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8 October 2017

Cyber Sovereignty and Online Borders Do Not Improve International Security

By Hugo Zylberber, Nikolas Ott

Hugo Zylberberg is a Fellow for Technology and Policy at Columbia University's School of International and Public Affairs. Nikolas Ott is a Mercator Fellow at the Mercator Program Center for International Affairs (Stiftung Mercator). This op-ed is based on a publication that was presented at the 2017 CyFy Conference in New Delhi, India.

In 2100 BCE, the ancient city-states of Lagash and Umma in Mesopotamia concluded the first recorded agreement to solve a border dispute. Little did they realize they were setting in motion a chain of events that would forever alter the course of history. Nearly 4000 years later, physical borders are still very much at the center of international relations and increasingly creeping onto the online world. Today, internet fragmentation—the process of erecting digital borders on a seemingly borderless space—is threatening to splinter the internet into loose internet-states.

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