What’s Splintered in the Splinternet ? A Multi-Layered Perspective on Internet Fragmentation

What future for the Internet? Is the Internet threatened with explosion, or are these fears unfounded, and only good enough to serve as a "red flag" in political negotiations? Our recent work in the frame of a report for the European Parliament, then a French-language book aimed at a broad audience (Perarnaud et al., 2022; Perarnaud et al., 2024), has tackled the question of the so-called Internet "fragmentation", or, as a controversial label sums up, the "Splinternets" phenomenon. In this book, we have addressed how what was fundamentally, in its early days, a horizontal and decentralized mechanism has become a system that favours monopolies and quasi-monopolies, the concentration of resources and wealth, informational, economic and military wars. Internet "fragmentation" happens at different levels, or layers, of the network of networks.

Francesca Musiani, Clement Perarnaud, Julien Rossi, Lucien Castex. What’s Splintered in the Splinternet ? A Multi-Layered Perspective on Internet Fragmentation. Critical Internet Governance : From Positions to a Field, Report of the Critical Infrastructure Lab and REDE, 2025, pp.60-64. ⟨halshs-05153906⟩ (lien externe)