SplinterCon

SplinterCon is an interdisciplinary conference focused on internet fragmentation and its consequences for contemporary societies and online liberties. Since the inaugural event in Montreal in December 2023, SplinterCon has convened in Brussels, Estoril, Berlin, Taipei, and now Paris, assembling network researchers, technology entrepreneurs, engineers, software developers, user experience designers, media professionals, and internet freedom advocates to confront the accelerating challenge of the splinternet.

This Paris edition, held in cooperation with the Center for Internet and Society (CIS-CNRS), the GEODE Center, and the European Research Council, examined digital sovereignty as both a political instrument and an emerging market, tracing how states, private companies, and technical infrastructures interact to produce network fragmentation at scale.

The following report presents the research, analysis, and perspectives shared across two days of sessions, structured around a central inquiry: what sovereignty means when applied to networks, who builds its infrastructure, how we measure its effects, and what federated alternatives might look like.

Contributors

Jos Poortvliet

Frédérick Douzet

Director, GEODE

Najib Safieddine

Andrey Soldatov

Investigative journalist, co-author of "The Red Web"

Julien Nocetti

Associate researcher, IFRI

Louis Pétiniaud

Researcher, ERC Dataroutes Project, GEODE; Associate Researcher, Cassini Conseil

Riccardo Nanni

Postdoctoral researcher, CIS-CNRS

Ksenia Ermoshina

Researcher, eQualitie, Ecole Nationale Superieure des Mines de Paris

Lai Yi Ohlsen

Senior Product Manager, Infrastructure Engineering, Cloudflare; Adjunct Lecturer, Parsons School of Design.

Video Recordings