Network sovereignty

With the failed Stop Online Piracy Act, the United States would have allowed law enforcement agencies to prevent online piracy by blocking access to websites. The response from bipartisan lobbying groups was strong. Stanford Law Professors Mark Lemly, David Levin, and David Post published an article called "Don't Break the Internet."[8] There were several protests against SOPA and PIPA, including a Wikipedia blackout in response to statements by Senator Patrick Leahy, who was responsible for introducing the PROTECT IP Act. Both acts viewed as good for mass media because they limited access to certain websites. The acts were viewed as an attack on net neutrality and so were seen as potential damaging to the networked public sphere.[9]

The Golden Shield Project, sometimes known as Great Firewall of China, prevents those with a Chinese IP address from accessing certain banned websites inside the country. People are prevented from accessing sites that the government deems problematic. That creates tension between the netizen community and the government, according to scholar Min Jiang.[10]

Russia's Roskomnadzor (Federal Service for Supervision in the Sphere of Telecom, Information Technologies and Mass Communications) was created in December 2008 in accordance with President's Decree No. 1715. The agency was created to protect personal data owners' rights. According to the Russian government, the agency has three primary objectives:

• ensuring society demand in high-quality telecommunication services as well as information and communication technologies;
• promoting mass communications and freedom of mass media;
• ensuring protection of citizens' rights to privacy, personal and family confidentiality.[11]

On 1 September 2015, a new data localization law provided Roskomnadzor with greater oversight. The law itself stipulates that any personal data collected from Russian citizens online must be stored in server databases that are physically located in Russia. It "creates a new procedure restricting access to websites violating Russian laws on personal data."[12] Even with staunch pressure from those who promote "free flow of information," President Vladimir Putin and the Kremlin remain stolid in assertions of network sovereignty to protect Russian citizens.[13]

China's approach could also be repeated in many other countries around the world.[14][15] One example was the Internet censorship in the Arab Spring, when the Egyptian government in particular tried to block access to Facebook and Twitter. Also, during the 2011 England riots, the British government tried to block Blackberry Messenger.

Many believe that the government has no right to be on the Internet. As Law Professor David Post at the University of Georgetown argued, "'[States] are mapping statehood onto a domain that doesn't recognize physical boundaries,'" at least in the context on the internet. He went on to say, "'When 150 jurisdictions apply their law, it's a conflict-of-law nightmare.'"[16] Some proponents of the internet, such as John Perry Barlow, argued that the current form of the Internet is ungovernable and should remain as open as possible. Barlow's essay was written about the 1990s Internet, and while it has changed very much since then, the ideas in his work are still salient in the ongoing debates surrounding the future of the Internet. In his essay A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, he advocated that governments should stay out of the internet.[17]

Network Sovereignty can affect state security, law enforcement on the internet, and the ways that private citizens use the internet, as many people attempt to circumvent the protections and legal devices, placed by many governments on the Internet, by using tools such as VPNs.

One of the most significant reasons for enforcing network sovereignty is to prevent the scanning of information that travels through other countries. For example, any internet traffic that travels through the United States is subject to the Patriot Act and so may be examined by the National Security Agency, regardless of the country of origin. Jonathan Obar and Andrew Clement refer to the routing of a transmission from a point in state A to another location in state A through state B as Boomerang Routing.[18] They provide the example of traffic from Canada being routed through the United States before returning to Canada, which enables the United States to track and examine the Canadian traffic.

Governments may want to enact network sovereignty to protect copyright within their borders. The purpose of SOPA-PIPA was to prevent what was effectively deemed theft. Content providers want their content to be used as intended because of the property rights associated with that content.[19] One instance of such protection is in e-commerce.

Currently, private networks are suing others who interfere with their property rights.[20] For the effective implementation of e-commerce on the Internet, merchants require restrictions on access and encryption to protect not only their content but also the information of content purchasers. Currently, one of the most effective ways to regulate e-commerce is to allow Internet service providers (ISPs) to regulate the market.[21] The opposing argument to regulating the internet by network sovereignty to allow e-commerce is that it would break the Internet's egalitarian and open values because it would force governments and ISPs to regulate not only the Internet's content but also how the content is consumed.[22]

Cyber sovereignty, known in Mandarin as 网络主权, has been a mainstay of Chinese Internet policy in recent years, and the international promotion of cybersovereignty forms an integral part of Chinese foreign policy, although it remains ill-defined within Chinese discourse.[14] The Great Firewall is the combination of legislative actions and technologies enforced by the People's Republic of China to regulate the Internet domestically. Its role in internet censorship in China is to block access to selected foreign websites and to slow down cross-border internet traffic.[27] The effect includes: limiting access to foreign information sources, blocking foreign internet tools (e.g. Google Search,[28] Facebook,[29] Twitter,[30] Wikipedia,[31][32] and others) and mobile apps, and requiring foreign companies to adapt to domestic regulations.[33][34]

The Chinese government and ruling Communist Party asserts cyber sovereignty, or control over all of China's digital resources, including servers, user data, technical infrastructure, and tech firms operating in China, both within the country and overseas. China's 2017 Cybersecurity Law of 2017 requires firms that offer "critical information infrastructure" in mainland China to store their data on Chinese government-run servers, allowing the state to access resources such as Apple's China-based iCloud data. The Data Security Law of 2021 also empowers the Chinese government to conduct national security audits over firms operating in China which gather user data.[35]

Project Andromède launched in 2009, with the aim to spend €285 million on "cloud souverain" or sovereign cloud.[36][37] The government spent €75 million on each of its two national champions, Cloudwatt and Numergy, but these two sold only €8 million worth of services, combined.[38] On January 1, 2020, all services were terminated and clients were advised their data was deleted.[39]

openDesk is a project to create administrative workspaces to enable digital sovereignty, initiated in 2023 by the German Federal Ministry of the Interior (BMI) and the public IT service provider Dataport.[40] There is collaboration with a team of open-source specialists from Collabora, Nextcloud, OpenProject, OpenXchange, Univention, XWiki, and others[41]

The Sovereign Internet Law is a set of 2019 amendments to existing Russian legislation that mandate Internet surveillance and grants the Russian government powers to partition Russia from the rest of the Internet, including the creation of a national fork of the Domain Name System.[42][43][44][45][46][47]