I’ve been meaning to write a eulogy for the concept of Internet freedom and the echoes we see in the current moment of “Internet sovereignty” discussions. The sovereignty work uses a lot of the same words and even advances important concepts like decentralization, independent and alternative infrastructures, a focus on open source software. But sovereignty falls short of freedom, and while there is a large intersection of the two, there are incredibly important differences.
Andrew Ford-Lyons wrote up an epxansive piece on this. Instead of struggling to add more, I’m going to drop in an egregious block quote and link you over to his post, On sovereignty and freedom and the internet (archive link):
“Freedom protects users from states. Sovereignty aims to protect states from each other. There are good elements in some sovereignty initiatives. Data protection matters. Transparency matters. Supply chain resilience matters. But sovereignty is a poor substitute for internet freedom. In many ways, it’s a retreat. The world now wants to put its borders online.
At an EU Open Source Policy Summit, Ruth Suehle argued that “digital sovereignty doesn’t mean a digital fortress. It means openness, and options, not being locked in.”
That is the aspiration. Sovereignty as diversification. Sovereignty as insurance policy. […]
Sovereignty begins as hedging behaviour. It rarely stays there. In authoritarian contexts, digital sovereignty isn’t an insurance policy. It’s an instrument of control. Iran’s National Information Network and its recently approved “electronic passive defense” doctrine formalise the ability to disconnect external networks during “crises.”
This final piece is important. North Korea, Iran, Russia, and China have all been building sovereign “internets” withing their borders, where they are fully independent of external influence - and exert total control.
This is not to say there is not good work happening. The sovereignty work is advancing some of the hardest problems we faced in Internet Freedom work: reasonably self-hostable, actually usable and functional modern tools (collaborative office suites, storage, and such) that was also secure and hardened and independent of vendor/cloud lock in. Tara’s “Three Servers and a Tunnel” gives an inpsiring peek into the possibilities we are seeing.
At the end, the sovereignty gives us “freedom from” - from vendor lock-in, from risk of American providers – but the Internet Freedom work promised us “freedom to” - to express ourselves online, to be private, to fully enjoy our human rights in the modern era. We are lesser for its loss, and at extreme risk of building a disjointed, splintered, internet, where we have all fenced in the commons and have lost something that mattered.