SplinterCon Online 2026

Challenging Digital Colonialism

Post Conference report

2026 ONLINE

The 2026 edition of SplinterCon was not supposed to happen this way. It was conceived as an in-person gathering in Lusaka, Zambia, co-located with RightsCon, the flagship global digital-rights convening organized by Access Now. Days before it was due to open, RightsCon was cancelled: a foreign power, exercising influence over the host government, made it impossible to hold a meeting of digital-rights defenders, researchers, and technologists on Zambian soil. The SplinterCon that resulted (convened online on May 5, 2026) thus opened under conditions that were themselves a demonstration of its subject: information control had reached across borders to silence a community before it could assemble.

The response was immediate. Speakers and organizers pivoted to a virtual format within days. What might have drawn eighty people to a banquet hall in Lusaka instead convened more than three hundred registered participants from across the globe. As one of the co-organizers put it in his opening remarks, gathering in larger numbers when somebody tries to shut a community down is exactly how that community answers censorship. The cancellation was, in the words of eQualitie founder and technical director Dmitri Vitaliev, a reminder that the splinternet is already here: over two hundred million people now live inside networks designed and operated as national internets, and the Russian and Iranian models, should they endure, are likely to be copied elsewhere.

This edition placed the African continent at its center. Africa, in the framing of SplinterCon lead researcher Ksenia Ermoshina, acts as a prism that makes visible the intertwined logics that make splinternets possible: authoritarian regulation that treats connectivity as something a government may switch off at will; fragile and dependent network topologies whose routing paths run through foreign hands; the economic and political interests of the “global north” in shaping African cyberspace; and surveillance and censorship sold as a marketplace product, exported from one region and installed in another. The history of the African internet is marked by colonization at every layer, from the physical cable to content and culture — and those dynamics persist even where formal political independence was won generations ago, because infrastructure, unlike flags, does not change hands at independence ceremonies.

The report follows the architecture of the day. Chapter 1 examines the lived experience and political economy of shutdowns in Africa. Chapter 2 maps infrastructural colonialism — the foreign vendors and policymakers whose investments in African networks do not always serve African civil society. Chapter 3 turns to the technical solutions, emerging technologies, and forward-looking tools that the internet-freedom community is building to keep people connected within and across splintered networks.