Three observations on the Internet in a multipolar world

Cristian Hesselman, Maarten Botterman, and Paul Timmers | Sat Feb 15, 2025

We offer three observations on the Internet in a polarizing world, which we discussed over dinner in the old town of Utrecht, the Netherlands, on January 30. Like back in October, we leveraged Paul’s and Maarten’s Internet governance expertise and my technical knowhow, which again led to a very interesting and lively debate.

Observation #1: multi-stakeholder Internet governance is more important than ever in a multipolar world

With the return of geopolitical blocs, we believe a multi-stakeholder community that standardizes, governs, and runs the public core of the Internet is more important than ever. This is because a state-dominated governance model in a multipolar world would introduce the risk of bringing inter-bloc or inter-state rivalry and conflict into global Internet policy making, which likely would result in certain people, organizations, or countries being banned from the Internet, thus diminishing its value as a global communications network. As a result, the Internet might even further fragment along geopolitical “fault lines“ for decades, which would hinder the rise of a future world order with fewer geopolitical tensions.

We believe the Internet’s current multi-stakeholder governance model with businesses, individuals, civil society, technical communities, and governments from around the globe reduces the risk of further global Internet fragmentation because it provides a pragmatic way forward beyond national interests and geopolitical agendas. This strengthens a “neutral“ form of Internet governance that focuses on keeping the Internet a global public communications infrastructure that is secure, stable, and open, allowing all individuals, organizations, and countries to connect to it and use it as a trusted instrument to address their problems and seize opportunities. For example, institutions like the IGF, ICANN, the IETF, and the RIRs treat all nations and economies based on the same established and published transparent principles for all.

In other words, we think global multi-stakeholder governance has proven to be a model that aligns with the Internet’s role as a worldwide civil communications infrastructure that needs to serve everyone across generations and across geopolitical landscapes.

Observation #2: in a multipolar world, the global multi-stakeholder model will co-exist with various regional and national Internet governance models

Our second observation is that in a multipolar world, the global multi-stakeholder model will co-exist with various continually evolving regional and national Internet governance models. Depending on the region’s societal system, these models will bring values and norms into the Internet protocol stack in various degrees. For example, the political system in Russia turned the Internet in Russia (RUnet) from an open infrastructure in the 2000s to a tightly state-controlled system as of the early 2010s with extensive surveillance and censored connections to the global Internet. Towards the other end of the spectrum, Europe emphasizes “good behavior“ and actively supports a global and open Internet, yet requires as an exception ISPs to block certain Russian media outlets since the war in Ukraine in 2022.

These regional policies also play a role at the protocol level, for instance in regions that actively promote the adoption of global IETF standards to increase Internet security and privacy for their citizens. For example, the US government recently urged network operators to implement security standards help avoiding the illegal interception of Internet routes, while in Brazil and in the Netherlands public-private partnerships stimulate the uptake of secure and privacy-enhancing DNS and email standards and good practices. Regions might further evolve this kind of thinking in the future by stimulating or even requiring networks to share data on their carbon emission to make the Internet more CO2-neutral.

So, regional politics is at all layers of the protocol stack though in various region-specific ways. It’s no longer the “politics-free“ stack of the early days (see Figure 1) because the Internet continues to further integrate into societies globally. As a result, it is increasingly important that “the technical architecture must accommodate the tussles of society while continuing to achieve its traditional goals of scalability, reliability, and evolvability“, as Internet pioneer David Clark put it back in 2005.

Observation #3: the increasingly polarizing approach to international relations is another call for Europe to strengthen its digital autonomy

Next to issues like privacy and intellectual property protection regimes that have been developing over decades, we see that the current uncertainties in the space of international relations lead to a further call for Europe to strengthen its digital autonomy and create a trusted environment for European data. However, this requires member states to collaborate more, as researchers from the Clingendael Institute recently pointed out. As a result, member states might feel more comfortable putting (parts of) their critical and privacy sensitive data and compute on cloud infrastructures in other EU member states rather than in clouds headquartered outside of the EU jurisdiction (currently mostly in the US).

We also observe various possibilities to further safeguard trust in the Internet within the EU region. For example, the EU could opt for a market strategy through which they protect new successful European cloud initiatives so they can grow without global hyperscalers preemptively buying them. Another possibility is that customers of global cloud providers team up and jointly state that they’ll switch to an EU provider if its capabilities match those of today’s dominant hyperscalers headquartered outside of the EU. This might make it easier for EU cloud providers to invest in innovating their service offerings because they know they’ll have customers waiting for it. From a technical perspective, cloud users could employ various forms of hybrid cloud architectures. For example, they could use a global provider as their primary and an EU provider as their backup, so they can easily switch them around once the latter is on par with the former.

While we understand the rationale and support the development of European alternatives to today’s hyperscalers, we think it is important to avoid the creation of closed cloud offerings if these would stifle innovation in the European cloud market and hamper adoption by countries outside the EU. To facilitate that, the EC could actively promote open designs and open source for new cloud services, enabling people around the world to more easily start a new cloud business and reduce the risk of further centralization of the global Internet around a handful of very large players. The open design of the DDoS Clearing House (open source software, and open legal and organizational templates) might offer a first glimpse of how to accomplish this.

Happy to hear what everyone thinks!

We’re happy to hear your feedback on our observations, so feel free to drop us a message through our LinkedIn post.