Leslie Daigle is CTO of the Global Cyber Alliance, a global nonprofit that makes the Internet safer by reducing widespread cyber risk.
The internet is not simply a communications platform; it is foundational infrastructure for the global economy. It has enabled decades of economic growth by allowing information, products and services to cross borders at unprecedented scale and low cost.
But persistent cyber threats are creating pressure for national and regulatory responses that risk fragmenting that infrastructure. Addressing those threats is essential—but doing so while preserving a single, open, interoperable global internet is equally essential.
Protecting the internet from fragmentation is both a technical objective and an economic imperative.
The Impact Of The Internet On The Economy
Much of today’s U.S. workforce has never known a working world without the internet at its center. Previous generations only had communications systems where cross-border services depended on agreements among carriers, and new services were largely controlled by the companies operating the networks.
The internet fundamentally changed that model. It dramatically lowered the barrier to participation in the global economy, making it possible for almost anyone, anywhere, to build and sell products and services to a worldwide market without first asking permission from the network or negotiating separate access to every country, carrier or market along the way.
We have built careers, companies, industries and, ultimately, much of the modern economy based on that openness and integrity of communications across the globe.
The Risk Of Fragmentation
The internet, however, is not immune to the efforts of bad actors who use the internet itself to launch attacks on businesses and people. Fights over digital property have included domain-name squatting, IP-address hoarding and intellectual property guarding through geo-fencing.
There have also been, and still are, major security attacks causing outages and undermining confidence in internet information flows.
The global reach of the internet comes with a cost. The successful removal and remediation of those threats has often come from collaboration and joint work among competitors, international groups of technical experts and law enforcement.
Persistent attacks and threats increasingly also lead to discussion of regulatory solutions. The challenge is that regulation comes from governments with bounded jurisdiction, but the internet’s technology has no borders.
To be clear, the problem is not regulation itself. The problem is attempting to solve global technical problems through interventions that stop at national borders, or, worse, require the internet itself to behave differently at those borders.
One clear example of the extraterritorial impact of internet services is the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). It’s an EU regulation, but it has caused ripple effects across the globe. Some websites elsewhere in the world decline to provide service to connections from the EU, in order to avoid the overhead of complying with foreign regulatory requirements. So much for the World Wide Web.
Meanwhile, mandating specific technical directions in one jurisdiction can be entirely ineffective in another. Removing intellectual property poachers from the domain name system in one country’s registry doesn’t remove them from registries in other countries, so the sites can still be found globally. Regulatory overreach in one jurisdiction can introduce interoperability problems in others, as we have only one routing system for the internet, and it has to work the same way, everywhere.
Why The Future Of The Internet Requires Careful Collaboration
The global economy’s dependence on an open internet is no longer theoretical. International exports of services that can be delivered digitally—from software and financial services to consulting and other professional services—have grown into a multi-trillion-dollar market, reaching roughly $5.4 trillion in 2025, according to UNCTAD.
At the same time, a 2025 OECD/WTO analysis estimated that full fragmentation of cross-border data flows could reduce global GDP by 4.5% and global exports by 8.5%. The analysis found that open data-flow regimes combined with appropriate safeguards could increase global GDP by 1.77%.
Openness, in other words, is not simply a design principle of the internet. It is an increasingly important feature of the global economy.
Cybersecurity threats are real, and governments and industry have legitimate reasons to act against them. But the economic value of the internet depends in significant part on something that is easy to take for granted: that it remains one interoperable global network. Security measures (technical, operational or regulatory) that fragment that network may solve one problem while creating another, potentially much larger one.
The goal is to make the internet safer without sacrificing the global interoperability that has made it such a powerful engine of economic growth. That will require sustained investment, international cooperation and collaboration among governments, industry, technical experts and law enforcement. The effort may be difficult, but the economic stakes justify it.
One global economy needs one global internet.
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