Even the most distracted — or the most dreamy — now have to reckon with the evidence. And now even the pioneers acknowledge that we live in a different world, perhaps uglier than before; certainly grayer. The same dream, the same vital energy that gave rise to the network must now be directed elsewhere: toward building the foundations of a world in which the freedom of the network and the demands of geopolitics can coexist.
The NAM2026 interviews with Doug Madory, director of internet analysis at Kentik, Mehran Gul, author of “The New Geography of Innovation,” and Paul Vixie, a pioneer of the domain name system and a member of the Internet Hall of Fame, converge on a single point: the global network has entered a harsher phase.
THE OPEN NETWORK UNDER PRESSURE
For Madory, who has spent years observing connectivity outages, blackouts are no longer the exception. “It has become a fact of life,” he says. “The power of internet communications is such that authoritarian governments feel the need to disconnect or throttle people’s communications, because they feel threatened.”
The figures bear out the perception. Access Now and the #KeepItOn coalition documented 313 shutdowns across 52 countries in 2025, the highest number since monitoring began in 2016. The phenomenon spans protests, elections, conflicts and domestic crises. The technique is changing too: not only total blackouts, but selective blocking of services, restrictions on platforms and more granular filtering.
Madory describes a response that cannot be left to individuals. In recent years, he explains, coordination has grown between network analysts, digital rights groups and industry operators. “Everyone’s data is a little different. Sometimes someone else can see something you can’t. Working together, we get a better picture.”
What is at stake is the ability to document what happens to the network when it becomes invisible. Without independent measurement, a blackout remains a political decision that is hard to challenge; with technical data, it becomes an observable fact that can be attributed and disputed.
FRAGMENTATION AND POWER
Vixie takes the argument to a more structural level. The original idea of a universal connection, always open and always neutral, belonged to a different era. “In the early 1980s, the internet had no untrustworthy parties,” he recalls. “It was a utopia.” Then the network became the infrastructure of daily life and of the global economy, drawing in conflict, abuse, propaganda and crime along with everything else.
Hence an uncomfortable position: every network is operated by some entity, for some purpose. Those who hold power over an economy, a culture or a nation see the internet as a necessary place in which to exert power. “The tools for doing this are getting better, and those tools will always win,” Vixie says.
For him, permanent technical opposition is not enough. “We should accept the inevitabilities and find a way to negotiate with our counterparties, rather than remain in eternal opposition.” The challenge is to understand which incentives push an actor to block, filter or segment the network, and which conditions might reduce the resort to it.
His hope comes not from a return to the internet of its origins, but from competition between those who build connections and those who build barriers. “There is a bright center to the internet,” he says, made up of services and communities that intend to be reachable. “Those who build roads always win in the long run against those who build walls.”
EUROPE’S INNOVATION LAG
If Madory and Vixie describe the network as political terrain, Gul shifts attention to Europe’s ability to compete in the new geography of innovation — a precondition, among other things, for a network that is free and delivers prosperity for all, since the EU pays closer attention than other regions to welfare and fundamental rights.
“The first step really ought to be to retain what Europe already has,” Gul says. In universities and technology ecosystems, he observes, the culture still leads people to move to the US, sell their companies to American players or raise money from American rather than European VCs. He cites UiPath, founded in Romania and no longer based there; Hugging Face, with French roots and a strong US center of gravity; and DeepMind, founded in the UK and now a division within Google.
A continent can fund research, build skills and regulate markets, but if its most promising firms grow elsewhere it loses parts of the value chain. In its 2026 package on the state of the digital decade, the European Commission links competitiveness, strategic autonomy and resilience to robust infrastructure, digital skills and the rapid adoption of advanced technologies by business.
For Gul, the other weakness is Europe’s ability to attract global human capital. “Immigration into Europe today is still economic migration. It is not talent migration,” he says. The United States, he notes, remains competitive partly because it imports skills: “Most of the reason why the US is competitive in tech is because it imports its talent, not because it produces its own talent.”
EUROPEAN DIGITAL SOVEREIGNTY DEPENDS ON CAPABILITY
The three perspectives point to the same conclusion: European digital sovereignty cannot be limited to protecting the internal market. It has to become technical, industrial and political capability. That means observing the network when it is cut off, defending openness without ignoring real conflicts, retaining companies born in Europe, and making the continent more attractive to researchers, founders and engineers.
Regulation remains part of the European model, especially in AI, where Brussels aims to combine trust, safety and industrial capacity. But without scale, investment and talent, the risk is that Europe ends up setting the terms of use for technologies developed elsewhere.
The internet remains a promise of connection, but it is no longer separate from politics. For the EU, the imperative now is to build enough strength to defend openness without depending on others for the infrastructure, the models, the platforms and the companies that make it possible.
— By Alessandro Longo, Journalist
