The Open Internet Was Always American. Now It's a Weapon.

In 1956, the Suez Crisis taught much of the world a lasting geopolitical lesson: infrastructure controlled by others is never entirely neutral. The canal was built to facilitate global commerce and interdependence, yet when political tensions escalated, it instantly became an instrument of leverage, coercion, and strategic vulnerability. States that once viewed interconnected systems as mutually beneficial suddenly confronted a harsher reality that openness depended not only on access, but on trust in whoever ultimately controlled the system.

The Internet is now approaching a similar moment.

For most of the Internet’s history, the United States presented itself not as a sovereign power over the network, but as its reluctant steward. Washington’s language was consistently framed around openness, interoperability, innovation, and freedom. The Internet was portrayed as a borderless domain that flourished precisely because governments, particularly authoritarian ones, were restrained from imposing territorial logic onto digital space. American policymakers, technology companies, civil society groups, and academics all reinforced the same narrative: the Internet’s success depended on keeping the state at arm’s length.

Yet this story was always only partially true.

Beneath the rhetoric of openness existed a deeper and largely unspoken reality: the global Internet was structurally embedded within American power. Its technical architecture, governance institutions, cloud infrastructure, semiconductor supply chains, undersea cable ecosystems, and dominant digital platforms were overwhelmingly American or heavily exposed to US jurisdiction. The Internet was “global,” but its center of gravity rested firmly in the US. What made this arrangement tolerable for much of the world was not the absence of sovereignty, but the relative restraint with which American power was exercised.

In this sense, Washington’s soft power rested on a form of hidden sovereignty. The US possessed extraordinary structural leverage over the digital ecosystem, but for decades it generally refrained from weaponizing that dominance in overtly coercive ways against allies and partners. This distinction mattered enormously. Countries accepted an American-centered Internet not because they were naïve about US influence, but because the benefits of participation outweighed the perceived risks of dependence. The network remained sufficiently open, predictable, and commercially attractive to sustain trust in the system.

Today, however, that equilibrium is breaking down and the rhetorical separation between American private enterprise and state power seems to have completely dissolved. This modern alignment was vividly manifested during President Donald Trump’s recent diplomatic trip to Beijing, where he was accompanied by an extraordinary entourage of Big Tech CEOs, including the leaders of Apple, Tesla, and Nvidia. By embedding the architects of global AI infrastructure, semiconductor supply chains, and digital platforms directly into a state delegation, Washington has made the underlying reality undeniable: the US is now explicitly using its technological dominance as a formal, coercive arm of its foreign policy and a primary lever for geopolitical bargaining.

When it rains, it pours

The debate around digital sovereignty has intensified dramatically over the past decade, and especially in recent years. What began as a primarily European discussion around data protection and platform regulation has evolved into a far broader geopolitical movement. States across the world are now seeking greater control over data flows, cloud infrastructure, AI systems, semiconductor supply chains, and digital public infrastructure. China pioneered one model through cyber sovereignty and state-centered Internet governance. Europe pursued another approach through strategic autonomy, digital regulation, and industrial policy, and its long-awaited tech sovereignty proposal attempts to cement this pursuit. India, Brazil, Indonesia, and others have advanced their own sovereignty-oriented approaches through data localization, platform rules, and digital industrial strategies.

For years, American policymakers largely interpreted these developments as protectionist overreactions or authoritarian deviations from the open Internet model. Digital sovereignty was often framed in Washington as synonymous with fragmentation and a threat to innovation, trade, and the global interoperability of the Internet itself. But the irony is increasingly difficult to ignore: the US itself has long practiced digital sovereignty, only using different language and with greater sophistication.

American control over key chokepoints of the digital economy, including cloud services, operating systems, app stores, semiconductors, financial infrastructure, and Internet governance institutions, is what has enabled Washington to shape global technological outcomes in ways few other states could replicate. Export controls, sanctions regimes, surveillance authorities, jurisdictional reach over American companies, and dominance over standards-setting processes all reflected sovereign power exercised through network centrality rather than explicit territorial regulation.

The Snowden revelations in 2013 marked an important turning point because they exposed the depth of US intelligence access to global digital infrastructure. For many countries, the disclosures shattered the assumption that the American-centered Internet was politically neutral. They demonstrated that openness did not necessarily mean the absence of state power; rather, it often masked asymmetrical dependence on American legal and intelligence systems.

Still, even after Snowden, many allies remained committed to preserving the broader architecture of the open Internet because they believed the US ultimately remained invested in maintaining a stable and rules-based digital order. The concern was not simply American power itself, but whether that power would continue to be exercised predictably.

The mask is off

This is where the contemporary moment becomes especially significant.

Under the second Trump administration, the language of sovereignty has become much more explicit in American technology policy. The shift is not merely rhetorical. It reflects a growing willingness to openly treat digital infrastructure, AI systems, semiconductors, and data governance as instruments of geopolitical leverage and national power.

Recent policy developments illustrate this transformation clearly. The administration has framed artificial intelligence as a strategic domain in which the US must preserve “technological dominance” and ensure that American governance models are adopted globally. New executive actions promote the export of full-stack American AI ecosystems, including chips, cloud infrastructure, data systems, cybersecurity frameworks, and governance standards, explicitly as tools of geopolitical influence.

At the same time, Washington has intensified export controls on advanced semiconductors and AI technologies, using access to computational power as a strategic lever against rivals, particularly China. The administration has also considered stricter monitoring of where advanced chips are deployed globally, reinforcing the idea that American technology remains subject to continuing US sovereign oversight even after export. Equally revealing is the administration’s increasingly confrontational position toward foreign digital regulation. Washington has openly opposed data sovereignty initiatives abroad, instructing diplomats to challenge localization rules and privacy regulations perceived as constraints on American technology firms. The logic here is unmistakably sovereign: preserving US influence over global digital markets while resisting foreign efforts to territorialize data governance in ways that weaken American control.

What is striking is not simply that the US is behaving strategically—major powers always do—but that the traditional distinction between the “open Internet” and sovereign control is collapsing. The US is no longer merely defending openness as a universal principle; it is increasingly defending an American-centered technological order as a national strategic interest.

This shift has profound consequences for allies.

Europe’s accelerating push for digital sovereignty cannot be understood solely as anti-Americanism or protectionism. Rather, it reflects growing uncertainty about the long-term reliability of dependence on US-controlled infrastructure. The concern is not only what Washington has done historically, but what it might do in the future under increasingly unilateral political conditions. This is the essence of anticipatory sovereignty. Countries are no longer decoupling or localizing solely in response to past coercion but they are restructuring digital dependencies because they can no longer fully discount the possibility of future volatility. Even democratic allies increasingly perceive technological dependence as a strategic vulnerability if critical infrastructure remains exposed to abrupt policy shifts, sanctions, intelligence demands, export controls, or geopolitical bargaining. The irony is that fragmentation is emerging not because American power disappeared, but because it became too central to ignore.

In earlier decades, the US benefited from a kind of infrastructural legitimacy. Its dominance was accepted because the system appeared relatively stable, rules-based, and mutually beneficial. Yet legitimacy in networked systems depends heavily on trust. Once states begin to fear that dependence could become coercive under shifting political circumstances, they naturally seek insulation mechanisms. This helps explain why digital sovereignty has become such a powerful political idea across vastly different political systems. While the motivations vary from one country to another, the underlying impulse remains remarkably similar: reducing asymmetric dependence within a technologically hierarchical system in an era of declining trust. Artificial intelligence is now accelerating this trend dramatically.

The AI ecosystem is even more centralized than the early Internet economy. Advanced compute infrastructure, frontier models, chip design, and cloud capacity are concentrated in a handful of firms and countries, overwhelmingly American. As AI becomes foundational to economic productivity, military capability, scientific research, and state administration, dependence on foreign AI infrastructure increasingly resembles dependence on critical national infrastructure itself.

This is why debates around “sovereign AI” are emerging so rapidly. Governments now seek not only data sovereignty, but also sovereign compute, sovereign cloud systems, domestic AI models, and independent digital infrastructure stacks. The fear is straightforward: countries that lack control over computational infrastructure may eventually lose meaningful autonomy over economic and political decision-making.

Ironically, the US simultaneously encourages and resists this logic. Washington promotes “AI sovereignty” for partners when it means adopting American AI ecosystems rather than Chinese ones. Yet it opposes sovereignty measures that would weaken American technological dominance through localization or regulatory constraints. This tension reveals the core contradiction of the current moment: every major power now speaks the language of sovereignty, but each defines it in ways compatible with its own structural position. The broader consequence may be the gradual transformation of the Internet itself.

Peering into the offing

For decades, globalization encouraged the assumption that digital interdependence would naturally deepen integration and reduce geopolitical fragmentation. Instead, interdependence has increasingly become securitized. States now view technological dependence not simply as economic exposure, but as strategic vulnerability. Connectivity is no longer automatically associated with stability; it is equally associated with leverage and coercion.

As a result, the Internet is entering a new phase in which openness survives selectively and conditionally rather than universally. Cross-border interoperability will continue, but increasingly through politically negotiated arrangements rather than purely market-driven integration. Digital infrastructure is becoming embedded within alliance structures, industrial policy, export control regimes, and national security strategies.

This does not necessarily mean a complete “splinternet.” The global network will not disappear into entirely isolated national Internets. The economic incentives for connectivity remain too powerful. But the assumption that digital systems can remain detached from geopolitical competition is becoming untenable.

The central lesson of the digital sovereignty debate is therefore not that sovereignty has suddenly returned to the Internet. Sovereignty was always there. The difference is that it was once softened by trust, institutional restraint, and the perception that American leadership broadly aligned with systemic stability. Today, that trust is eroding. And when trust dissolves in networked systems, states do what states have always done: they seek insulation, redundancy, and control. Digital sovereignty, in that sense, is not merely ideological fragmentation. It is geopolitical insurance against uncertainty in an era where technological infrastructure has become inseparable from national power.