The weaponization of private corporate infrastructure: Internet fragmentation and coercive diplomacy in the 21st century

Abstract

In the early 1990s, US leaders promoted the internet as post-nation “global information infrastructure.” However, throughout the 2000s, critical internet infrastructure became centralized under the tight control of a handful of US-based multinational companies. This paper examines the US government’s willingness to leverage its regulatory control over privately run critical infrastructure to exercise massive internet surveillance ( pulling information from sovereign states), massive influence campaigns ( pushing information into sovereign states), and, increasingly, to levy unilateral cyber-sanctions on other sovereign states ( cutting information flows through blockages and digital lock-outs). The US government is now asserting its territorial sovereignty over what it had presented as global infrastructure in order to advance its narrow national goals. I argue that the weaponization of corporate internet infrastructure by the US government marks a new era of internet governance and is one of the key drivers of what is often discussed as internet fragmentation in internet governance forums.