Net Neutrality and the Splinternet: Is the Open Internet Fragmenting Beyond Repair?

The Internet Was Never Supposed to Have Borders

The foundational design of the internet — packet switching, open protocols, end-to-end connectivity — assumed a single, interoperable global network. For approximately two decades, that assumption held. A user in Algiers could access the same websites, use the same applications, and reach the same servers as a user in San Francisco, Berlin, or Tokyo. The architectural principle was simple: the network carries data without discriminating based on source, destination, or content. That principle now faces existential pressure from governments, corporations, and geopolitical forces pulling the internet apart.

The term “splinternet” describes the emerging reality: parallel internet ecosystems defined by national borders, regulatory regimes, and political ideologies. China’s Great Firewall blocks access to Google, Facebook, YouTube, WhatsApp, and thousands of other services for over 1.1 billion internet users, replacing them with domestic alternatives (Baidu, WeChat, Douyin). Russia’s Sovereign Internet law (Federal Law No. 90-FZ, signed into law in May 2019, with enforcement escalating sharply since 2022) gives Roskomnadzor the technical capability to isolate Russia’s internet segment (Runet) from the global network. Iran’s National Information Network (NIN) routes an increasing share of domestic traffic through state-controlled infrastructure, operating as a closed intranet that can function independently of the global internet. These are not marginal examples — they represent internet access conditions for well over two billion people.

The fragmentation is not limited to authoritarian states. The EU’s regulatory approach — GDPR, the Digital Services Act, the Digital Markets Act, the AI Act — creates a distinct legal environment that shapes what services are available and how they function for over 450 million Europeans. US tech companies now maintain separate infrastructure, content moderation policies, and data handling practices for the EU market. India’s Digital Personal Data Protection Act (DPDPA) 2023, which took effect in 2025, adds another regulatory jurisdiction — its cross-border transfer framework empowers the government to restrict data flows to blacklisted countries, while sector-specific rules already mandate data localization in payments, telecom, and financial services. The internet is not splitting into two blocs — it is splintering into dozens.

The Technical Machinery of Fragmentation

Internet fragmentation operates through specific technical mechanisms that are worth understanding precisely, because they determine both the effectiveness and the reversibility of splitting. The four primary tools are DNS manipulation, BGP (Border Gateway Protocol) routing controls, deep packet inspection (DPI), and application-layer filtering.

DNS manipulation is the simplest and most widely used technique. When China blocks access to google.com, it instructs domestic DNS resolvers to return false results (NXDOMAIN or redirect to a warning page) for blocked domains. This is effective against casual users but trivially circumvented by using alternative DNS servers (Google’s 8.8.8.8, Cloudflare’s 1.1.1.1) or DNS-over-HTTPS (DoH). Russia and Iran use similar DNS-level blocking but have increasingly moved toward more sophisticated methods as VPN adoption grew.

BGP routing manipulation is more consequential. BGP is the protocol that determines how traffic flows between autonomous systems (the large networks that collectively form the internet). Russia’s TSPU (Technical Means of Countering Threats) — DPI hardware mandated for installation at ISP and carrier networks under the 2019 sovereign internet law — can reroute or block traffic at the BGP level, effectively preventing packets from reaching foreign networks. This is what enables the “kill switch” capability that Russia tested in December 2024, when authorities disconnected the Dagestan region from foreign internet services for approximately 24 hours in what Roskomnadzor described as a trial of its isolation capabilities. DPI adds content-level analysis: rather than simply blocking destinations, DPI systems inspect the actual payload of network packets to identify and filter specific protocols (VPNs, Tor), applications, or content types. China’s Great Firewall uses DPI alongside active probing techniques to detect and disrupt VPN connections, forcing users into an ongoing technical arms race with censorship circumvention tools.

The economic cost of these technical interventions is substantial. Government-imposed internet shutdowns cost the global economy an estimated $7.7 billion in 2024, according to Top10VPN’s Global Internet Shutdown Tracker — across 167 major outages in 28 countries affecting over 648 million people. That figure surged to $19.7 billion in 2025, a 156 percent increase driven largely by Russian information control measures. But the ongoing efficiency loss from fragmentation — duplicated infrastructure, compliance costs, reduced cross-border digital trade — is harder to quantify and almost certainly larger.

Net Neutrality in 2026: Three Models Diverging

Net neutrality — the principle that ISPs should treat all internet traffic equally, without blocking, throttling, or paid prioritization — was supposed to prevent a different kind of fragmentation: economic rather than political. The principle has evolved into three distinct regulatory models that show no signs of converging.

The EU model is the most robust. The Open Internet Regulation (Regulation 2015/2120) has been enforced since 2016 by BEREC (Body of European Regulators for Electronic Communications). It prohibits blocking and throttling, restricts zero-rating practices (where ISPs exempt specific services from data caps), and requires transparency on traffic management. Enforcement has been reinforced through landmark Court of Justice of the European Union rulings — including cases against German operators Telekom Deutschland and Vodafone, and a July 2025 ruling (Case C-367/24) against a Romanian operator’s zero-rating scheme — that have progressively strengthened the prohibition on discriminatory pricing. National regulatory authorities across the EU monitor compliance, though a European Commission review noted that penalties imposed to date remain modest.

The US model has collapsed. The FCC’s April 2024 reinstatement of net neutrality rules under the Biden administration was struck down entirely by the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals on January 2, 2025, in a unanimous ruling that found the FCC lacked authority to regulate broadband as a Title II telecommunications service — citing the Supreme Court’s June 2024 Loper Bright decision, which ended judicial deference to agency interpretations of ambiguous statutes. In February 2026, the Trump-appointed FCC formally removed the remaining net neutrality rules without public comment. The US now has no federal net neutrality protections, though state-level laws in California, Colorado, and Washington still impose some constraints on ISP behavior. In practice, US ISPs do not engage in overt blocking or throttling, but the absence of federal rules leaves the door open to paid prioritization and discriminatory traffic management. The debate has become so politically polarized that meaningful bipartisan legislation appears unlikely before 2028.

India’s approach represents a third path. TRAI’s (Telecom Regulatory Authority of India) 2016 Prohibition of Discriminatory Tariffs regulation effectively banned zero-rating — most notably blocking Facebook’s Free Basics initiative, which offered free access to a curated set of websites. India’s net neutrality framework, implemented through Department of Telecommunications license amendments in 2018, is among the strongest globally but faces emerging challenges from 5G network slicing, which allows operators to create differentiated service tiers for specific applications (autonomous vehicles, telemedicine, industrial IoT). TRAI and the DoT have indicated that network slicing does not inherently violate net neutrality principles, but Reliance Jio’s push for regulatory clarity on slicing has opened a debate that remains unresolved.

What Fragmentation Means for Developing Nations

Developing nations, including Algeria, face the consequences of internet fragmentation without having meaningfully participated in creating the rules. The splinternet creates a trilemma: align with the US digital ecosystem (and accept American platform dominance and surveillance exposure), align with the EU regulatory model (and bear the compliance costs designed for the world’s largest single market), or build sovereign alternatives (and accept the isolation and innovation costs that China and Russia have absorbed).

Most developing nations lack the market size to negotiate with any bloc from a position of strength. When the EU’s GDPR requires data localization or specific consent mechanisms, Algerian companies serving European customers must comply regardless of domestic law. When the US imposes sanctions that affect cloud services (as seen with AWS and Azure restrictions in certain jurisdictions), companies in affected countries lose access to infrastructure they depend on. When China exports its surveillance and censorship technology — a 2025 CSIS analysis documented Huawei “Safe City” agreements across 52 countries, concentrated in Asia and sub-Saharan Africa — the technical architecture of fragmentation travels with it.

For Algeria specifically, the fragmentation trend has direct implications. Algeria Telecom’s international connectivity relies on submarine cables (including Alpal-2, SeaMeWe-4, ORVAL, and Med Cable Network) that land in Europe, tying Algeria’s internet infrastructure to European routing and peering decisions — though the upcoming Medusa cable, with its first phase expected in 2026, will diversify Mediterranean connectivity. Algeria’s data protection framework — Law 18-07, strengthened by Law 25-11 enacted in July 2025 with new requirements for data protection officers and impact assessments — will need to demonstrate interoperability with the GDPR if Algerian tech companies are to serve European markets or participate in EU-funded digital cooperation programs. The absence of a domestic net neutrality framework means Algerian ISPs face no regulatory constraint on traffic management practices — a gap that becomes more significant as Algeria’s mobile operators explore content bundling and zero-rating deals that could shape what Algerians access online. The splinternet is not just a problem for superpowers. It is a structural condition that every connected nation must navigate.

Frequently Asked Questions

Sources & Further Reading

• Top10VPN — Global Internet Shutdown Tracker (2024 & 2025 Reports)
• OONI — Open Observatory of Network Interference
• EU Open Internet Regulation 2015/2120 — BEREC
• Sixth Circuit Strikes Down FCC Net Neutrality Order (January 2025) — Davis Wright Tremaine
• TRAI Net Neutrality Framework — Telecom Regulatory Authority of India
• CSIS — Watching Huawei’s Safe Cities (2025)
• Internet Society — Russia’s Sovereign Internet Law
• India DPDPA 2023 Implementation — Hogan Lovells
• Freedom House — Freedom on the Net 2025