The development community needs to wake up to a harsh reality: the same digital sovereignty rhetoric we’ve championed to counter American and Chinese tech monopolies is being weaponized by authoritarian regimes to justify mass surveillance and communication blackouts that literally enable state violence.
Weaponized Infrastructure in Iran
Let’s be honest about what digital sovereignty means in practice for millions of Iranians right now. Since January 8, 2026, Cloudflare data shows that Iran’s internet traffic has dropped to effectively zero. Not through gradual degradation but through systematic architectural control.
The regime didn’t just flip a switch. They deployed military-grade electronic warfare to jam Starlink signals across entire regions while security forces physically confiscated satellite dishes from homes and businesses.
This isn’t some aberration we can write off as exceptional. Iran spent years building exactly the digital public infrastructure the international community celebrates elsewhere.
Their National Information Network splits Iran’s digital space into parallel realms: a domestic network where essential services run and a global internet connection that exists only at the state’s discretion. Sound familiar? This is precisely the model advocates of digital sovereignty promote, just with different stated intentions.
The domestic network is faster, cheaper, more reliable, and infinitely more dangerous. Banks, businesses, and public services are compelled to adopt it. Meanwhile, access to the global internet can be severed instantly during political uprisings—which is exactly what happened when protests erupted in late December 2025.
3 Fatal Flaws in Digital Sovereignty
The global push for digital sovereignty rests on three premises that Iran systematically demolishes:
1. Government control equals public interest.
Iran’s mandatory digital identity cards link to biometric databases cross-referenced with extensive CCTV systems.
Mobile phone regulators have direct access to location tracking, metadata monitoring, and selective service disruption capabilities. SIM cards and devices are tightly linked to national identity information, making it trivial for authorities to map social networks and identify protest organizers before, during, and after demonstrations.
We’ve seen this pattern before.
- India has conducted more internet shutdowns than any other country.
- Chad remained offline for an entire year.
- Access Now documented 296 shutdowns across 54 countries in 2024 alone, a 35% increase since 2022.
The common thread? Governments invoke “sovereignty” or “national security” to justify the unjustifiable.
2. Localization prevents exploitation.
Digital public infrastructure orientation determines development impact, but not in the way sovereignty advocates claim. Estonia’s X-Road system and India’s UPI succeed not because they’re “sovereign” but because they’re designed for public benefit with embedded governance, user autonomy, and protocol-based supervision.
Iran’s NIN is designed for exactly the opposite: maximum state control and minimum individual autonomy.
The technical architecture matters less than the political architecture. You can build entirely “sovereign” systems that enable horrific rights violations. Iran proves it daily.
3. Nationalism alternative to corporate dominance.
Every attempt at digital sovereignty necessarily limits the number of players who can satisfy nationalist demands.
As Farzaneh Badiei argues, “If you truly care about decentralization, you won’t achieve it through digital sovereignty. That concept directly contradicts decentralization. You can’t have mandated markets and a decentralized system at the same time.”
Iran didn’t break its dependence on foreign tech—it just replaced American surveillance capitalism with Iranian state surveillance authoritarianism.
International Community Is Failing
An open letter from Iranian digital rights activists to the ITU delivers a cold reality check: international institutions mandated to safeguard connectivity have become increasingly reluctant to fulfill their responsibilities toward those who depend on the internet most for safety, visibility, and survival.
The ITU and broader internet governance community have allowed the concept of digital sovereignty to be co-opted and weaponized by authoritarian regimes instead of advancing Indigenous and oppressed communities to protect their autonomy.
A network designed to be global, open, and resilient has been reframed as something states can fragment and shut down at will.
We cannot allow the threat of market domination by the US and China to convince us to abandon the idea of a free global internet and decentralized digital governance.
Iran sends researchers and digital policy experts to major international conferences to speak eloquently about localization, self-determination, sovereignty, and local law. Then those same officials return home to oversee systems that track protesters in real-time and disable connectivity to mask mass violence.
Accountability Requires Transparency
Iran’s researchers who present at international conferences know exactly what their National Information Network enables. They’ve watched their government use it to identify protest organizers, track participants’ movements, and mask killings by severing international communication. They know that when the internet goes dark, gunfire begins. When connectivity returns, families discover which of their loved ones will never come home.
Internet connection is a human right, and it should not be left in the hands of irresponsible governments or private actors.
As Professor Azadeh Akbari writes, “No nationalism is better than any other and the danger of democratic backsliding is always present, even in the US and the EU.”
The development community faces a choice. We can continue celebrating digital sovereignty initiatives without interrogating their actual impact on human rights, or we can demand that any system called infrastructure for development be designed from the ground up to prevent exactly what Iran is doing right now.
