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.