Authoritarians are on a campaign to divide the open internet into a patchwork of repressive enclaves

• Freedom House’s newest report, Freedom on the Net 2022: Countering the Authoritarian Overhaul of the Internet.

At home and on the international stage, authoritarians are on a campaign to divide the open internet into a patchwork of repressive enclaves. More governments than ever are exerting control over what people can access and share online by blocking foreign websites, hoarding personal data, and centralizing their countries’ technical infrastructure. As a result of these trends, global internet freedom has declined for a 12th consecutive year.

Rising digital repression in many countries mirrored broader crackdowns on human rights over the past year. Nowhere was this clearer than in Russia, Myanmar, Libya, and Sudan, which experienced the world’s steepest declines in internet freedom.

Online censorship reached an all-time high, with a record number of governments blocking political, social, or religious content, often targeting information sources based outside of their borders. More than three-quarters of the world’s internet users now live in countries where authorities punish people for exercising their right to free expression online.

Alarmingly, these antidemocratic abuses are not the only factor behind the splintering of the internet into national segments. Some governments are clearly cultivating a domestic digital space where state-endorsed narratives dominate and independent media, civil society, and already marginalized voices are more easily suppressed.

 But others are inadvertently contributing to country-based barriers through their efforts to tackle disinformation, protect user data, and deter genuine cybercrimes. Whatever the intention, however, the growing fragmentation of the internet comes with serious consequences for fundamental rights including freedom of expression, access to information, and privacy, particularly for people living under authoritarian regimes or in backsliding democracies.

The internet has always been subject to some degree of fracturing along national borders, but increased state intervention in the last year has dramatically accelerated the process. This report identifies three main causes of fragmentation, all of which contributed to declining respect for human rights online: restrictions on the flow of news and information, centralized state control over internet infrastructure, and barriers to cross-border transfers of user data.

While the physical network of the global internet remains intact, a growing number of users only have access to an online space that mirrors the views of their government and its interests. Authorities in 47 of the 70 countries covered by Freedom on the Net have limited users’ access to information sources located outside of their borders.

Virtually all of these restrictions constitute clear infringements of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which codifies the right “to seek, receive, and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.” In most cases, entrenched and aspiring authoritarian leaders sought to contain online dissent by preventing residents from reaching information sources based in countries with a greater level of media freedom.

This increasing fragmentation is part of a global, multifaceted competition for control over the digital sphere. For most of the period since the internet’s inception, representatives of the private sector, civil society, and the technical community have participated in a consensus-driven process to harmonize security standards and technical protocols.

This has resulted in a decentralized infrastructure that speaks a common language, enabling users to communicate with one another and access information regardless of location. Authoritarian powers have long sought to displace this multistakeholder model of internet governance with one that promotes cyber sovereignty, or greater control by states.

Diplomats from China and Russia have made inroads at institutions like the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), seeking to transform the United Nations agency into a global internet regulator that advances authoritarian interests. Doing so would fundamentally alter the open internet, preventing billions of people from communicating with one another and accessing life-changing resources without explicit permission from their governments.

A cohort of democracies are pushing back. Having previously focused on a narrower set of economic and security interests linked to countering Beijing, the United States has more recently shown promising signs of reengagement in cyber diplomacy with the aim of promoting a positive vision of democracy in the digital age.

The European Union (EU) has also moved forward with innovative and rights-respecting regulatory approaches to address harms that have been exacerbated by the internet. But many democracies have yet to significantly improve respect for online rights within their own borders.

Of the 35 countries covered by this report that participated in the US-hosted Summit for Democracy, 13 experienced an internet freedom decline over the past year, as did 10 of the 18 Freedom on the Net countries that signed the US-led Declaration for the Future of the Internet. By adopting flawed policies at home, democracies risk undermining the very values they seek to defend abroad, while potentially cutting off residents of in authoritarian countries from a freer and more open internet.