For Westerners who hadn’t yet divined which way the wind was blowing in Russia on internet freedom, the answer arrived in September 2021 with a clutch of FSB agents at the door of a top Google executive in Moscow. It was days out from Russia’s elections and the agents had a message: take down the app of Kremlin opposition figure Alexei Navalny, which encouraged protest votes against Vladimir Putin’s ruling party, or go to jail.

She had 24 hours.

Google reportedly rushed the woman to a hotel, checking her in under an alias and installing a security team. But before long the Russians were at the door again. Tick tock.

The app soon vanished from Google stores, and Apple’s too.

For years, Russia’s internet had been relatively open for a country run by an authoritarian regime, says Justin Sherman, a Washington cyber expert and Atlantic Council fellow. There was surveillance, sure, but nothing on the scale of China’s Great Firewall. But since the poisoning of Navalny, and Putin’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, a digital iron curtain has fallen in Russia. It’s getting harder for news from the West, much less of the war, to get through. Now, the Kremlin is accelerating plans to build its own walled-off “sovereign” internet, something Iran, Cambodia and Brazil are trying themselves. China is pushing for a new protocol to reshape how the net works altogether.

All this means that the internet – that great global connector invented by US researchers 40-odd years ago – is splintering. And if it frays enough, experts warn, it may be impossible to put back together again.

So, is there even one internet any more? How might it splinter? And what happens if it does?

What is the splinternet?

President Bill Clinton had reason to be cocky about the internet in 2000. The United States had invented it and spread it, and was home to the first generation of mammoth companies on it, Amazon and Google included. “We know how much the internet has changed America – and we are already an open society. Imagine how much it could change China,” Clinton said in a speech in Washington. “Now, there’s no question China has been trying to crack down on the internet. Good luck,” he said to laughter. “It’s sort of like trying to nail Jell-O to the wall.”

He was wrong.

Just a year after Clinton’s speech, researcher Clayton Wayne Clews coined the term splinternet, writing of many privatised internets rather than one unified system. His term has since come to denote all the ways the internet is fragmenting, but the primary danger Clews foresaw – regulation by governments – is still the one most closely associated with the idea of a splinternet.

The Snowden revelations shifted the debate, emboldening regimes to start what tech experts doomily call the balkanisation of the internet.

Today there are an estimated 5 billion people online, on tens of billions of devices. But those users are not all surfing the same web. YouTube in America is to Youku in China as it is to RuTube in Russia. Sites accessible in, say, Darwin might be blocked in Delhi.

Meanwhile, internet freedom – access to the net without surveillance or suppression – is down for the 12th year in a row, according to US non-profit Freedom House. Beneath the net’s technical wizardry and promise of human connection, there have always lurked two ideological strands: one rooted in a belief in free-flowing ideas and commerce, and another in governments seeking a security edge.

Splintering happens at a content level, Sherman explains, as governments censor the way the internet looks in their countries. But the technological bones of the net are cracking too.

After all, the internet is largely run under the sea, not in the Cloud – data zooms along underwater cables snaking between continents. After the 2013 Edward Snowden leaks revealed that US and British intelligence agencies had been spying on traffic around the world via these cables, Brazil urged countries to break away from the Americanised net. The US was once seen as the champion of an open internet, its powerful First Amendment right to free speech making its own web one of the freest in the world. But the Snowden revelations shifted the debate, giving cover to regimes to further what tech experts gloomily call the balkanisation of the internet.

China wants to develop a new version of the protocols running the net ... and they have a radical plan to do it.

Brazil announced it was building its own walled-off net (yet to come online) and teamed up with Europe to start rerouting more undersea cables around the US. Other countries are racing to lay their own. As the great powers fight for technological dominance, nations are kicking out foreign tech companies they take issue with – from the US, Australia, and other nations banning China’s telecom giant Huawei on network infrastructure builds, to Russia labelling Facebook’s parent company, Meta, a terrorist organisation.

Now China wants to develop a new version of the protocols running the net. If undersea cables are the superhighways of internet traffic, then protocols are the road rules governing how they get to their destination. There’s the internet protocol (that’s the IP in IP address) that manages how data is broken up into packets and sent rocketing around the world, and there’s the transmission control protocol that ensures it arrives where it’s supposed to. China’s technology ministry has joined with a group of its telecoms, including Huawei, to argue that the internet’s underlying architecture needs an update. And they have a radical plan to do it: a new IP they’ve been floating to the United Nations, which critics say will allow for more centralised government control. (More on that later.)

How do countries restrict internet freedom?

If you were online in China right now, chances are you wouldn’t be able to open this webpage. You wouldn’t find anything about the Tiananmen Square massacre of student protesters in 1989; or pictures of Winnie the Pooh (they were infamously scotched by censors because they gesture at unflattering views of President Xi Jinping).

China has been arresting people for online posts since the early years of the “worldwide web”. Today, there is no reliable count of how many have served jail time. Dr Li Wenliang, who first raised the alarm over COVID-19 in Wuhan in 2020, for example, was reprimanded for his social media posts before he died of the virus.

“Chinese people often say the bird that pokes out its head will be shot first,” says one Beijing internet user, speaking on condition of anonymity to avoid reprisals. “We know what happened to Wuhan whistleblower doctor Li Wenliang.”

It’s not just China. In countries such as Saudi Arabia and Iran, people are on death row for tweets and Facebook posts. And some regimes, including China, Russia and Saudi Arabia, deploy armies of trolls and bots to intimidate and harass critics online.

Throttling, where a connection is slowed to the point that it becomes nearly impossible to use, is more subtle.

Freedom House measures the openness of the internet in 70 countries every year. In 2022, China was at the bottom and Russia not far off. India, where the government is cracking down on online dissent under President Narendra Modi, is midway down. The US, Australia, the United Kingdom and many other Western democracies score in the 70s (out of 100) – broadly open but with laws enforcing, say, legal suppression orders and copyright, or aimed at preventing crimes. (“Everyone, even authoritarian regimes, are trying to wipe out child exploitation material, for example,” says Sherman.) Freest of all is Iceland’s net. Its residents enjoy “near-universal connectivity, minimal [content] restrictions … and strong protections for their rights online,” according to Freedom House.

In Australia, our strict defamation laws, in particular, can stifle freedom of speech, as can controversial 2015 metadata laws requiring internet providers to keep extensive information on what customers do online. The idea was to help police detect serious crime, but it’s been frequently accessed to chase down parking fines (or pry into journalists’ activities).

Elsewhere, so-called local office laws requiring international tech companies to base staff in a country they operate in – should the need arise, say, to send secret service agents to their door – are also a concern. Indian authorities have raided Twitter offices in Delhi (though no staff were there at the time); and, while the FSB was hounding Google’s Moscow executive over the 2021 Navalny smart voting app, armed men appeared at the company’s offices too. Meanwhile, in Brazil, police say a number of internet providers have been taken over by mobsters.

Of course, during times of unrest, some governments simply shut down their internet altogether. Think of Iran’s blackout after the death of a young woman in the custody of morality police in 2022. That year, 35 countries pulled the plug a total of 187 times – a record high. (Nearly half of these blackouts happened in India.) But shutdowns come at a cost: lost e-commerce, banking and tax transactions, investor trust. Throttling, where a connection is slowed to the point that it becomes nearly impossible to use, is more subtle, making it seem as if a service is just overloaded. Rights groups say throttling is deployed in Myanmar, Turkey and Russia.

States can also ask internet companies to remove data, known as takedowns. Google lists such requests in its transparency report: it has received 3.5 million since 2011. National security is the most common reason, ahead of copyright claims, defamation and privacy. In the past decade, Russia requested by far the most removals from Google services, at more than 123,000, followed by Turkey at about 14,000 and then India, the US and Brazil in that order, with fewer than 10,000 requests each. Sometimes Google refuses, or restricts content in a limited way (only in a particular country, for example), though the company did not provide an overall breakdown of its decisions.

Another censorship ploy is DNS manipulation. DNS stands for domain name system: it’s the phonebook of the internet. People think of the net in terms of website addresses, like amazon.com or smh.com.au, but these domain names need to be turned into numbers for machines to understand them. That’s the job of the DNS. By manipulating the servers that deliver it in a given territory, a user who searches for YouTube, for example, could be redirected to a censored domestic equivalent.

The internet’s DNS architecture is overseen by a Californian non-profit with a very literal name: The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN). Russia wants to create its own DNS, claiming it will need one if it’s ever severed from the global internet – as Ukraine asked ICANN to do when Russia invaded it in 2022. (ICANN declined Ukraine’s request, saying it was neither technically feasible nor within the group’s mission.)

But for Russia, this is a key plank in its ambitions to create its own “sovereign internet”. To do that, it’s looking at its ally China.

What is the gold standard for restricting the net?

When the internet arrived in China just before the turn of the millennium, the ruling Communist Party of China (CCP) was already quietly building the means of controlling it. Under Project Golden Shield, China often turned to Western companies for the technology it needed to funnel internet traffic through chokepoints and spy on what flowed in.

China monitors traffic where cables land on its shore using sniffer or mirroring devices that copy data and reflect it back to Golden Shield computers to block it or not. It’s known as China’s Great Firewall, and it’s the world’s most extensive internet censorship tool. As the destabilising power of the internet has become clear – including during the Arab Spring of the early 2010s, when pro-democracy protesters mobilised against autocratic Middle Eastern and North African governments on social media – the firewall has grown “higher”.

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China now blocks Western social networks, except for a version of LinkedIn stripped of its newsfeed. Google Search has been barred since 2010, when the US company pulled out over a cyberattack and censorship concerns. China’s own social networks are tightly monitored, such as the Twitter-like Weibo and WeChat, a super app that combines the group messaging of WhatsApp with Facebook-like features, payments and even stock trading.

“Censorship covers a broad but ambiguous category of keywords and topics,” says the Beijing internet user. “We don’t know when and where [we’ll] hit the red line.”

The word Shanghai, for example, was unsearchable when the megacity was suffering under draconian COVID-19 lockdowns. And references to “seeing it” were removed after a protester scaled a Beijing bridge and unfurled a banner calling for Xi’s removal on the eve of the 2022 Communist Party Congress. This kind of granular control requires an army of human censors – China spends billions of dollars every year on censorship.

Already, Iran is making its own ‘intranet’ faster than the global net, to encourage domestic use.

So, while other regimes have long eyed China’s Firewall with envy, they do not appear to have the resources to retrofit control, Sherman says. Still, some are trying. In 2021, for example, Cambodia announced plans for a national internet gateway that would route all traffic in and out of the country through chokepoints managed by government contractors. So far, its introduction has been delayed by technical woes, although blocks on independent media are rising.

France’s digital affairs envoy has warned that nations may be more tempted to unleash devastating cyberattacks on rivals if the fallout can be quarantined behind the high walls of their own national internets. “The key thing is that they’ll feel emboldened,” Sherman adds.

Already, Iran is making its own “intranet” faster than the global net, to encourage domestic use, he says. “It’s the equivalent of your work computer intranet but it’s faster and cheaper than the real internet.” North Korea’s intranet, Kwangmyong (meaning bright light), is a different story: it runs on a modified version of outdated software and there’s not much there besides state media and an internal email service. Only an exclusive few have access to the actual web.

But it is Russia, with its own sprawling satellite network and large population (146 million), that is now accelerating the splinternet, experts say. Putin, having once declared the internet a “CIA project”, is doubling down on plans to build a “Ru-net” outright – a place for Kremlin propaganda and surveillance to run wild.

How do you build a sovereign internet?

The Kremlin’s internet awakening, as Sherman calls it, began with Russia’s invasion of Georgia in 2008. Suddenly, state media accounts were being contradicted by Georgian bloggers posting from the ground. By the Arab Spring a few years later, and certainly by Ukraine’s 2014 Maidan revolution, the power of the internet had become clear to Putin. But Russia had a lot of catching up to do.

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The problem, Sherman says, is that Russia’s internet is so diverse, and censorship ad hoc. “It’s not built into the bones of the net the way it was in China.” There are so many internet providers, he says, that part of the Kremlin’s signature Sovereign Internet Law of 2019 (intended to start carving off Russia from the global net) entailed simply listing who owned the networks. “They didn’t even know.”

In China, while “the state censors the border of the net, inside China a lot is put onto companies,” Sherman says. “Like, ‘Here’s the list of keywords to block and if you don’t, you’ll get in trouble, and you don’t want to get in trouble’.”

Russia has tried that too, but there’s been infighting over who should pay for the “black boxes” – surveillance gear – that the new law required companies to install across the network. “Companies were dragging their feet because they had to pay, and there wasn’t good follow-up from the state to check,” says Sherman. “We like to think of these regimes as ruthlessly efficient bureaucracies, but it’s not like that.”

He points to the Kremlin’s disastrous attempt in 2021 to throttle Twitter (Russian business URLs got knocked out too, causing economic pain): “It was amateur hour.” And before that, there was the failed ban of social media platform Telegram. “It was a paper ban, not a technical ban, because they couldn’t actually do it,” Sherman says. “There were even senior Kremlin officials still openly using Telegram.” That “ban” was lifted in 2020.

‘They’re a long way off this Putinish vision of hitting a button and disconnecting from the world but ... [t]hey’re certainly getting there. And fast.’

Still, the Kremlin is determined. Russia is a “dictatorship of law”, after all, according to Putin. “So if it’s in their law, it’s very much what they intend to do,” Sherman says. “They’re paranoid of the West, of [their] digital payments and everything else being exposed to sanctions.”

In December 2019, the Kremlin’s claim it had successfully tested a disconnection from the global net was met with scepticism by experts. “Russia often announces tests have gone so well that no one noticed,” muses Sherman. “They’re a long way off this Putinish vision of hitting a button and disconnecting from the world. But that’s not to say it’s impossible. They’re certainly getting there. And fast.”

The internet regulator Roskomnadzor started as a bureaucratic backwater in 2008 with a few dozen employees, but thousands of documents leaked to The New York Times in 2022 show it has since morphed into a vast apparatus of censorship and surveillance. It runs a blacklist of more than a million banned websites.

The state is getting better, too, at blocking virtual private networks (VPNs), which cloak a user’s IP address and help people around the world evade censorship, and it has shut down or driven out nearly all independent sites and media. (Google Russia, after being harassed over the Navalny app, had its bank account seized by the state in 2022, and has since been winding down operations there, though Google did not say whether any staff remained in Russia.)

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In occupied Ukrainian territory, meanwhile, Russian soldiers have forced internet providers to reroute traffic from Kyiv through Crimea and (via an undersea cable) to Russia. “They put guns to their head and just said, ‘Do this’,” a local company owner told The New York Times. “They did that step by step for each company.” In other areas, the invaders have shut off internet and mobile cellular networks altogether, forcing people to use Russian alternatives.

So what if the net does split?

It may not be one big dramatic break that rips apart the net – China and Russia putting up a wall and changing their systems overnight. It could be death by a thousand cuts, says Sherman. “Look at how the Great Firewall has evolved. That wasn’t set up in two hours.”

Democracies are pushing back. In 2022, 60 countries – including the US, Australia and members of the European Union – signed a Declaration for the Future of the Internet, agreeing to promote “a global internet that advances the free flow of information”. Yet divisions remain over that future even among Western nations. The EU wants data on its citizens mostly held within its borders, for example, a move fiercely resisted by US tech giants. The internet has always been largely unregulated and many governments, both democratic and authoritarian, now want less power in the hands of these big tech firms.

‘Beijing is walking this tightrope ... They still want to be able to do business and, let’s not forget, intelligence collection.’

But China’s push for a new IP to govern the net is by far the most radical, as it would centralise control around governments rather than users (requiring people register to be online). It promises speeds fast enough to drive a car remotely or hold video chats via live holograms, and, according to The Financial Times, may already have some backing from Russia, Saudi Arabia and Iran. But, despite its futuristic (if vague) slideshow presentations, the Chinese proposal has been repeatedly shot down by the UN, Sherman says, and panned by the EU and other groups as unnecessary. The current IP still works well, they say. A new one would require costly tech upgrades. “But, China works regionally with countries,” says Sherman. “So the worry is they use [this] different protocol for, say, 25 countries and then all of a sudden you have new devices in circulation built for a completely different technological standard.”

Some experts say technological divides will cause headaches but can be bridged. It’s political divides that will be harder to cross.

Still, Sherman thinks it unlikely China will unplug entirely. “Beijing is walking this tightrope between maximising the economic gains of the internet with openness and maximising regime security with political control. They still want to be able to do business and, let’s not forget, intelligence collection.”

Russia, too, risks “pissing people off” at home if it pushes too far with its internet crackdown, he says. “And people will always find ways around.”

In China, for example, there are not just VPNs to evade censorship, but a creative online underground of alternative terms. “National treasure” and “panda” mean state security agencies, the Beijing internet user says. (The panda is a national treasure and that phrase sounds the same as national security agency in Mandarin.) “When texts are censored, people send them by screenshots, sometimes even upside down to confuse the censoring machines.”

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Despite trends towards splintering, Katherine Mansted at Australian digital security firm CyberCX says the global economy still depends on online communication. It is enduring even in the most trying circumstances, she says, pointing to larger-scale efforts against censorship, such as Elon Musk’s Starlink satellites helping people in Ukraine stay online. “Cutting yourself off from the internet, in many senses, is cutting off your nose to spite your face,” she says.

Still, given satellites have nothing like the bandwidth of undersea cables, even “if you put up a gazillion different satellites across China to get over the Great Firewall,” Sherman says, it wouldn’t be the great worldwide web of today.

At best, it’d give you something like the net of the ’90s: painfully slow.

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