# What's Splintered in the Splinternet? A Multi-Layered Perspective on Internet Fragmentation

Francesca Musiani, Clement Perarnaud, Julien Rossi, Lucien Castex

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Francesca Musiani, Clement Perarnaud, Julien Rossi, Lucien Castex. What's Splintered in the Splinternet? A Multi-Layered Perspective on Internet Fragmentation. Critical Internet Governance: From Positions to a Field, Report of the Critical Infrastructure Lab and REDE, 2025, pp.60-64. halshs-05153906

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Submitted on 11 Jul 2025

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# What's splintered in the “splinternet”? A multi-layered perspective on Internet fragmentation

Francesca Musiani *
with Clément Perarnaud,
Julien Rossi and Lucien
Castex

splinternet|fragmentation|human rights|Europe|democracy

What future for the Internet? Is the Internet threatened with explosion, or are these fears unfounded, and only good enough to serve as a “red flag” in political negotiations? Our recent work in the frame of a report for the European Parliament, then a French-language book aimed at a broad audience (Perarnaud et al., 2022; Perarnaud et al., 2024), has tackled the question of the so-called Internet “fragmentation”, or, as a controversial label sums up, the “splinternets” phenomenon. In this book, we have addressed how what was fundamentally, in its early days, a horizontal and decentralized mechanism has become a system that favours monopolies and quasi-monopolies, the concentration of resources and wealth, informational, economic and military wars. Internet “fragmentation” happens at different levels, or layers, of the network of networks.

## Internet “fragmentation”, and what we can do about it

So, will the Internet explode, or fragment beyond repair? Our work shows that the answer likely lies somewhere between the two extremes mentioned above. There is indeed no direct and imminent threat which dooms the Internet, as we know it, to fragmentation into a multitude of “splinternets”. Multi-layered tensions of a (geo-)political, economic and commercial nature do act as centrifugal forces, including the material and technical layer of the network of networks; however, the Internet model arguably still has a bright future ahead of it.

But awareness of the threats to the unity of the Internet can motivate us to act, making “critical” approaches Internet governance a series of actions embedded in our daily actions as Internet users (/consumers/ citizens...) in addition to a tool for conceptualization and debate. Instead of favoring the use of social networks and other proprietary platforms which lock their users into walled gardens, it is possible to use federated social networks, such as Mastodon, which allow a freer circulation of information. A number of actions can be carried out at an individual scale, and at different layers of the Internet: to resist the transition from e-mails (which are based on open standards) to private messaging services which do not communicate with each other (WhatsApp, Messenger, Slack, etc.); to choose an ISP which offers a real public IP which allows us, if we wish, to have our own server at home; to exercise our right to portability when we want to change platforms; and so on.

On a more collective scale, the adoption of encryption - including for emails - helps secure everyone's exchanges, by making the circulation of encrypted messages on the Internet commonplace. Ensuring that digital services (websites, applications, etc.) work on all browsers - and not just on Google Chrome - and on all operating systems also reduces the ability of digital giants to impose their choices to users and forces them to continue to

★ Research Professor
French National Center for
Scientific Research (CNRS)
Centre Internet et Société (CIS)
<francesca.musiani@cnrs.fr>
This short paper is the result of
joint work with Clément
Perarnaud, Julien Rossi and
Lucien Castex, and a longer
version of it has been published
in September 2024 as the
conclusion of a book (Perarnaud
et al., 2024).
play the game of interoperability. Calls to (re-)build an independent web are beginning to emerge, and numerous community network projects (e.g. in France, some of them are federated by the French Data Network federation) are fighting to ensure that a real alternative to hegemonic technological silos remains. Projects like the Tor network help people living in dictatorships circumvent their country's censorship. All these possibilities should not appear as abstract, reserved for specialists or difficult to implement. On many scales, the decisions we make every day affect the health of the Internet, both in our personal and professional lives. When a sports association decides to do without a website and make do with a WhatsApp group, it strengthens Meta's ability to secede from the Internet. When a school or university decides to host all of its emails on a Google or Microsoft server, it reinforces the power of these companies. When a journalist does not publish a public key allowing her to send encrypted emails, she makes herself unavailable to all those who would like to write to her but take risks in doing so due to the political regime of the country where they reside.

## Is Internet unity a desirable policy goal?

Of course, just as relying solely on the actions of individuals to fight global warming is illusory, it is not realistic to expect Internet users to come to the aid of Internet unity without the existence of public policies that also act in this direction. This leads us to ask a fundamental question: is Internet unity desirable? In our work of the past three years we have, in some ways, assumed that the fragmentation of the Internet is a bad thing. Both our report for the EP and our book seek, above all, to explain how the Internet works, and why there are concerns about its survival. We have therefore mostly avoided this question, but it now seems essential to return to it, and some of our thoughts are laid out here.

Indeed, if we were to play the “splinternet-devil’s advocate”, it is clear that the principle of an open and global Internet can sometimes come into contradiction with other fundamental principles, such as the right to privacy, the right to security, or intellectual property rights. In fact, when the EU – or other democratic states or supra-national entities – impose new rules on Internet players with a view to protecting these rights, this inevitably has the effect of affecting the availability of certain information on a regional scale, even if the European approach seems increasingly extraterritorial in its scope of application. We saw this, e.g., with the discussions on the right to be forgotten.

In the name of the fight against illicit content (of all kinds: apology for terrorism, revenge porn, hate speech, online scams, etc.), democratic states are putting in place legal and technical measures which often echo those of other States whose stated objective is to better control, or even “police”, their infrastructures and the digital content accessible on their territory, as illustrated by the Chinese and Russian cases. This does not mean that the objective is the same; but the technical means of getting there looks similar. Therefore, if such practices are deemed acceptable in liberal democracies, what can we say in response to states that limit connectivity with the aim of restricting freedoms?
This tension is at the origin of a real political headache for many decision-makers. In fact, on the one hand, it is a question of guaranteeing regulation of digital infrastructures allowing public actors to guarantee respect for human rights online through territorial legal instruments. On the other hand, it is about allowing these same infrastructures to function in such a way that users who elsewhere wish to escape a walled Internet, imposed by a state actor violating human rights, are able to do it. Added to this problem is the thorny question of the political approach to follow in relation to fragmentation itself. Indeed, the new political activism of States and their – clearly more strategic than in the past – vision of the Internet inevitably induces forms of fragmentation (even if on different scales).

## A human rights-based approach to Internet fragmentation

Rather than demonizing any form of fragmentation as such, we propose (contrary to what most current political approaches suggest) to judge them not only in terms of their direct effects for the network, or their effects on the accessibility of certain content, but also in light of their effects on human rights. We do wish to acknowledge here, as a premise, that the human rights approach is based on a Western-originated paradigm, that it comports with a normative dimension, and that, for both of these reasons and others, there is some degree of debate and controversy about this approach, that does not enjoy a fully globalized consensus. Nonetheless, human rights law can offer a framework that can help to make sense of what an acceptable fragmentation of the Internet could be, or, to put it in the vocabulary of the European Court of Human Rights, what would be a fragmentation that is “necessary in a democratic society”, and we believe it can give us a key to approach the issue of Internet fragmentation from a “critical Internet governance” perspective.

The unity of the Internet is deeply linked to the right to freedom of expression. Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights proclaims that “Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression, which implies the right not to be disturbed for their opinions and the right to seek, receive and disseminate, without regard to borders, information and ideas through whatever means of expression.” For Article 11 of the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights, freedom of expression includes the right “to hold opinions”, to “disseminate” them without interference from public authorities, but also to “receive information [...] and ideas [...] without consideration of borders.” When a state restricts access to the global Internet, it restricts the ability to access information across borders and by any means. It is therefore a limitation of freedom of expression.

Freedom of expression, in France as elsewhere in Europe, is not absolute. It is likely to be limited, according to Article 10 paragraph 2 of the ECHR, when it is necessary “for national security, territorial integrity or public safety, the defense of order and the prevention of crime, the protection of health or morals, the protection of the reputation or rights of others, to prevent the disclosure of confidential information or to guarantee the authority and impartiality of the judiciary”.

We therefore consider that rules protecting privacy are welcome to protect Internet users in particular from the predatory practices of big tech
companies. If adopted on a national or regional scale, it is possible that these rules create a gap between the experience of one user and that of another who is located in a country where such rules have not been implemented. adopted. This also implies (under the terms, in Europe, of the GDPR) that the transfer of personal data to countries which do not respect the rights to privacy and the protection of personal data can be prohibited. The role that the Internet, and the digital services that it enables, now play in our societies invites certain interventions by the public regulator in many areas, and one of the side effects of these interventions is to lead to forms of fragmentation. However, having established that universal access to a unified Internet arises from the fundamental right to freedom of expression, any public intervention that fragments the Internet must be “provided for by law and respecting the essence of these rights and freedoms”, to repeat the terms of the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights.

This approach can also lead to slowing down the illusory quest for technical solutions to social problems which manifest themselves in the forms of online expression that States - even democratic ones - seek to ban. We are witnessing a “progression/regression” which consists of first imposing censorship at the level of the DNS system, then preventing direct connections to certain IP addresses, then prohibiting encryption or VPNs, or even creating a sort of local national network, such as in Iran. This “progression/regression” comes from the inability to accept that, whatever the legal and technical measures adopted to combat a phenomenon - including crime -, each of these techniques has its flaws which allow them to be circumvented. This effort then weighs more and more heavily on legitimate uses of the Internet, to the point of creating de facto fragmentation for a majority of Internet users, without this guaranteeing the chimera of a world without crime. Perhaps it would then be relevant for liberal democracies to remember that they are based, as a political regime, on the acceptance of a self-limitation of state power through systems of counter-power. Refusing to participate in the rush which would ultimately lead to the explosion of the Internet, without however giving up when it is “necessary in a democratic society” to take into account other general interests, also means accepting that there is a healthy limit to the power of the State.

Finally, if for a long time freedom of expression was a “negative freedom”, i.e. a freedom made possible by the absence of interference from public authorities (Berlin, 1969), it is on the way, in the face of the power of the digital giants, to become a “positive freedom”, guaranteed by the action of the State in the face of private actors who restrict it. This is the meaning of the Digital Services Act, which equips Internet users in Europe who want to appeal against a censorship decision enacted by platforms. In this sense, the positive actions of public authorities in favor of Internet unity are a way of guaranteeing the fundamental right to freedom of expression... as long as this does not conflict with other general interests, which require the imposition of measures contributing to acceptable (i.e. not prevent the survival of the Internet as a whole) forms of fragmentation.
## Conclusions

Despite its limits, which are linked to its Western origins and normative dimension, a human rights-based analytical framework has the merit of getting us out of the impasse of a horizon where the supporters of a united Internet and those of a fragmented Internet (for good or bad reasons) regularly affront each other, without taking into account the underlying trends which have revolutionized our uses of networked communication technologies, and which have made the Internet one of the most important infrastructures of our time. In this sense, it can provide a valuable contribution to “critical Internet governance”, by situating current debates about Internet fragmentation in the longue durée, and by making explicit the intersection of technical, political, legal and economic dimensions that affect Internet unity and the instruments at the disposal of different actors – first and foremost, us as users, consumers and citizens – to act upon it, and about it.

## Politics of Citation

This is an essay-type contribution and as such, it has very limited citations. Two out of three are of a report and a book written by three (male) colleagues and myself (female), in the frame of a project (Splinternet, 2021-2022) which I coordinated and was funded by the European Parliament.

In this paper, citations are distributed as follows: female names (2 out of 9 names; 22%), male names (7 out of 9 names; 78%); co-authorship female-male names - no matter the order (2 out of 3 cited publications; 67%); institutional sources (1 out of 3 cited publications; 33%).

## References

- Berlin, Isaiah. 1969. Two concepts of liberty. In Four essays on liberty, 118-172. Oxford University Press.

- Perarnaud, Clément, Julien Rossi, Francesca Musiani, and Lucien Castex. 2022. “ SplInternets”: Addressing the renewed debate on Internet fragmentation. Report commissioned and published by the Panel for the Future of Science and Technology (STOA) of the European Parliament, July 11. https://www.europarl.europa.eu/thinktank/en/document/EPRS_STU(2022)729530

- Perarnaud, Clément, Julien Rossi, Francesca Musiani, and Lucien Castex. 2024. L'avenir d'Internet: Unité ou fragmentation? Le Bord de l'Eau éditions.