Internet Governance beyond the States? The unprecedented traits of the future digital ecosystem

Abstract

The essay identifies the main questions that the future digital ecosystem poses, describing the phenomenon of Internet fragmentation as one of the most complex and problematic aspects that emerges in the current geopolitical scenery, where the tendency of States to elaborate “techno-nationalistic” aimed at the construction of an autonomous and independent network, technologically different from the original distributed and interoperable architecture on which the traditional operating model of the global Internet is based. In fact, various regulatory interventions proliferate in the global panorama that require the massive use of general surveillance tools to ensure centralized control of the Internet, as a strategic priority objective of technological supremacy established to protect the critical infrastructures of the States, to avoid the risk of possible external attacks capable of destabilizing the internal order. With respect to the progressive balkanization of the Internet, the economic and political power of the “Big Tech” in the guise of new dominant “players” is strengthening as an unexpected variable of the changed Internet ecosystem.