Techies, activists, and academics were in Paris this month to confront the doom scenario of internet shutdowns, developing creative technology and policy solutions to break out of heavily censored environments. The event– SplinterCon– has previously been held globally, from Brussels to Taiwan. I am on the programme committee and delivered a keynote at the inaugural SplinterCon in Montreal on how internet standards must be better designed for censorship circumvention.
Censorship and digital authoritarianism were exposed in dozens of countries in the recently published Freedom on the Net report. For exampl,e Russia has pledged to provide “sovereign AI,” a strategy that will surely extend its network blocks on “a wide array of social media platforms and messaging applications, urging users to adopt government-approved alternatives.” The UK joined Vietnam, China, and a growing number of states requiring “age verification,” the use of government-issued identification cards, to access internet services, which the report calls “a crisis for online anonymity.”
We once believed technology would bring liberation, but instead, each year delivers new instruments of control for governments and companies while everyday citizens’ use of technology is restricted.
Why, in an era of unprecedented technological capability, is censorship still thriving?
Censorship is not a technical problem; it’s a governance choice. Today’s internet is not just a conduit for information, but a geopolitical battleground, and the architecture of the internet holds immense sway over the contours of our global landscape.
In-country censorship is still often sold as national security, and it inevitably props up authoritarianism, as highlighted in the Freedom House report. But it’s not just authoritarian states censoring the internet. While governments, with the cooperation of corporations, claim to fight child abuse and disinformation in the name of “safety” and “security,” they often deploy the same mechanisms to suppress dissent, obscure accountability, and shape narratives in their favor.
Cross-border censorship, too, is accelerating. Economic fragmentation in a post-neoliberal era finds resonance in “digital sovereignty,” whereby states are tightening control over their borders and betting on the AI-powered success of their own tech industries. The global internet requires a delicate balance between sovereignty and interoperability: the means by which jurisdictions take control of internet traffic while communications and commerce remain open is a deeply technical matter. Now it’s a highly political one, too.
Censorship, in all cases, is not an unfortunate but necessary byproduct of the information age; it is a feature of power in a connected world.
Today, there is rising public concern around corporate power moving from the boardroom into government. We used to call these companies “too big to block,” imagining that a silver lining of their global dominance might be that it could shield users from censorship and surveillance. Instead, they’ve become too big to hold accountable and too protective of their power, and so their bold support for people in regions of digital repression has waned.
Governments have privatized power. And global governance mechanisms like the recently ratified UN Cybercrime Treaty require companies to quietly perform post-neoliberal diplomacy, responding directly to requests from jurisdictions for user data. Plenty of companies are loudly resisting this delegation from governments to adjudicate on national and international humanitarian legal issues.
Google has resisted China and Russia. Signal and Apple have both threatened to leave the UK market. But other businesses make short-term compromises with any authority, democratic or otherwise, undermining diplomatic and human rights goals, to protect profits and market access. Tech power is as risky to human rights as it’s ever been, and we need brave corporate leadership to protect human rights.
There exists a technical document published by the Internet Research Task Force (IETF RFC 9505) that describes the mechanisms that censorship regimes around the world use to block or impair internet traffic and their implications for end-user access to content and services. Deeply tied to policy regimes that are economically protectionist and making geopolitical power plays, the specifications in this document implicate the machinery behind the deeply socio-political impacts of censorship. It’s proof that censorship is a solved technical problem waiting on political will to catch up.
While niche tools like VPNs are critical for high-risk users, the real failure is that Big Tech doesn’t deploy networks using known, standardized circumvention techniques at scale. The IETF/IRTF is in the early stages of establishing the long-term research of censorship as an area of study for Internet Protocol designers.
Companies argue that defying censorship laws risks total shutdowns, denying citizens access altogether. But this logic—“better partial access than none”—merely teaches governments that coercion works.
Democratic governments might have started out in an ideological war over open internet governance– like the U.S.’s fight against China. Still, today it’s just about corporate dominance with no one, not even Europe, trying to pretend this is anything other than economic protectionism. Ironically, broad cuts to foreign assistance have unquestionably undermined global access to US tech.
Giants of the internet have more political power than ever, and they’re squandering it. Governments and corporates have never been more aligned, but this serves to retrench power mutually, unless this alliance is used to stand up for human rights.
Human rights defenders are challenging this corporate–government alignment with clarity of mission. While watchdog groups like Freedom House document abuses and heighten global pressure, convenings like SplinterCon and RightsCon–to be held in May in Zambia–are building a movement to resist censorship from the ground up. EU parliamentarians recently issued a joint letter urging Big Tech to counter online repression in Iran. At the same time, US congresspeople introduced the FREEDOM Act to ensure unfiltered internet access for people living in Iran. These front-line efforts show that public pressure still works, and that democratic societies can set the terms of digital governance if they choose to. These are promising developments, but they don’t just require follow-through; we need an expansive coalition that can pressure governments and corporations alike to resist the quiet normalization of censorship as a matter of fundamental human rights.
Mallory Knodel is a public interest technologist and a Public Voices Fellow on Technology in the Public Interest with The OpEd Project.
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