Cyber-barriers are hardening as geopolitical tensions rise around the world. And reversing the accelerating fragmentation of the internet will require a serious global effort and policy coordination.
This was the central theme of the keynote address at last week’s Black Hat Europe conference, delivered by Frédérick Douzet, professor of geopolitics at the University of Paris 8. Her research focuses on the physical structure of the internet and its geopolitical implications.
Your messages, my cables
One example of how importantly governments treat the way information flows are routed came in May 2022, when Russian troops invaded Kherson and forced internet service providers to disconnect from the Ukrainian network and to reconnect to the internet via Moscow.
Kherson occupies a strategic location by the Black Sea, near the mouth of the 2200-km-long Dnieper river.
“For Russia, controlling the roots of the internet has become a strategic priority in order to be able to control information,” said Douzet.
But both sides in the Russia-Ukraine conflict have sought to press home geopolitical advantage in cyberspace.
In February 2022, shortly after Russia’s full-scale invasion, Ukrainian authorities issued a decree under martial law, ordering the country’s network operators to block 600 Russian autonomous systems that were operating within Ukraine.
“It’s a turn towards the infrastructures of the internet for geopolitical control”
And a month later, Ukraine’s deputy prime minister sought global support in cyberspace, appealing to the internet’s governance organisation ICANN to suspend the Russian internet domain “.ru”.
ICANN declined, saying “we maintain neutrality and act in support of the global internet. Our mission does not extend to taking punitive actions, issuing sanctions, or restricting access against segments of the Internet – regardless of the provocations”.
These episodes are all indicative of a wider trend, said Douzet.
“It’s a turn towards the infrastructures of the internet for geopolitical control,” she said. “This is in line with the increased militarisation of cyberspace and now the weaponisation of the public core of the internet,” said Douzet.
Some countries are attempting to restore control at their national borders, said Douzet, over what they see as their share of cyberspace—in other words, controlling the path that data takes.
Gaining this control allows countries not only to block certain types of internet traffic, but also to spy on traffic and to divert it, said Douzet.
Threats to the internet’s resilience
The threats to the internet’s resilience come from two directions, said Douzet.
The balkanisation of cyberspace that we’ve seen in Ukraine and elsewhere could undermine the free global flow of data, she said.
But another trend—the concentration of global data traffic amongst large routing operators and a few major content platforms, like Meta (Facebook), Google and Amazon—has so far seen less scrutiny, said Douzet.
“This dynamic of concentration is largely invisible outside a community of technical experts,” she said, “and it also leads to a form of fragmentation along commercial lines. It could also raise issues of the free flow of information, of resilience, and really thorny questions about digital sovereignty,” said Douzet.
How sanctions can backfire in cyber
Now that we’re in a period of global conflicts in cyberspace, what can we do about it?
“Sanctions can contribute to trapping populations in tightly controlled information bubbles”
Sanctions programmes—one of the preferred tools of US-allied countries in achieving foreign policy and national security goals—may backfire in the virtual realm, said Douzet, citing Russian-occupied Crimea as an example.
“Paradoxically, Ukraine’s sanctions against companies that continue to provide internet connectivity to Crimea after annexation have helped separate out Crimean cyberspace from Ukraine’s cyberspace,” she said.
“Sanctions can contribute to trapping populations in tightly controlled information bubbles,” she said.
Which side of the digital frontline?
Just how rigid the boundaries between such information bubbles can now be seen on the digital frontline in Eastern Ukraine, which reflects the actual deployment of troops on the ground, said Douzet.
In 2023 Douzet’s research team sent internet data packets to Ukraine’s capital from two cities that are less than 60km apart but which are on opposing sides of the river Dnieper and of the frontline.
The researchers sent one test message from Kherson, which is in Ukrainian hands, and the other from Nova Kakhovka, which is Russian-occupied, said Douzet.
Mapped in the graph below, the internet messages took entirely different routes. The one sent from Nova Kakhovka took a much slower and more circuitous route, passing through several Russian autonomous systems and the UK before eventually arriving at its destination.
By contrast, the data packet sent from Kherson didn’t leave Ukrainian territory and took a much shorter route to Kiev.
Two messages to Kiev from Ukraine’s front line
We should all ask whether it’s acceptable to weaponise public cyberspace in this way, said Douzet: the trend could affect the resilience of the entire internet, she said, as well as causing the excessive concentration of power in the hands of a few network operators.
“The more the internet is centralised around a few nodes, the fewer alternative routes you have,” said Douzet.
Too far gone?
The accelerating enclosure of parts of the internet by countries and companies and the increasing weaponisation of cyberspace raise vital public policy questions, Douzet said.
“Are we losing the original model of the resilience of the internet? Should we consider re-decentralising cyberspace?”
“I have all the questions, but unfortunately not the answers”
“How can we think through policy and industrial solutions to enhance the decentralisation of the network? How can we envision a form of multi-polarity, even beyond safe control?”
“How can innovative technologies help provide a multiplicity of data routes, storage and access to increase the resilience, security and stability of cyberspace?”
So far, we’re far from reversing the current direction of travel, she suggested.
“I have all the questions, but unfortunately not the answers,” were Douzet’s parting words to the Black Hat Europe conference.
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