Governance
Rethinking digital control: Why the idea of sovereignty in cyberspace is a fallacy
Technology expert challenges the notion of digital sovereignty, arguing cyberspace lacks enforceable authority and structured control.
Headline
Technology expert challenges the notion of digital sovereignty, arguing cyberspace lacks enforceable authority and structured control.
Context
“Sovereignty is not a feeling, a slogan, or a narrative. It is a structural property. Where enforcement and final authority do not exist, sovereignty does not exist. Everything else is branding.” ——Lu Heng, CEO at Cloud Innovation, CEO at LARUS Ltd, Founder of LARUS Foundation. In a recent essay titled On The Sovereignty Fallacy , technology policy expert Lu Heng argued that commonly used notions of digital sovereignty are deeply misleading. Heng, CEO of LARUS Limited and founder of the LARUS Foundation, draws on direct experience with core internet governance institutions to suggest that sovereignty is not an abstract narrative of power or control but a structural property that emerges only where enforcement and final authority exist. He asserts that much of what is labelled digital sovereignty is in fact an illusion — a branding exercise that obscures deeper governance problems. The essay was published on 31 December 2025 on Heng’s personal blog, where he examines structural misunderstandings about how internet infrastructure is governed.
Evidence
Pending intelligence enrichment.
Analysis
One of his central claims is that collective entities such as “African digital sovereignty” do not constitute sovereign authority because they lack unified jurisdiction, shared enforcement mechanisms, or a final decision-maker. According to Heng, attempts to treat centralised systems — such as the way internet number resources are managed by Regional Internet Registries (RIRs) — as political authority points miss a fundamental point about how the internet operates. Decisions at registries, he argues, are coordination records that exist only because network participants voluntarily recognise them; they are not commands enforced by sovereign power. Heng warns that framing registry authority as political control turns cooperative systems into battlegrounds for litigation, sanctions and paralysis because it invites competing assertions of power that the internet’s architecture cannot support. His suggested alternative is to decouple the registration layer from political gravity altogether, potentially through fully distributed systems that align more closely with how internet cooperation has historically functioned. Also Read: Why IPv4 scarcity highlights wealth, value and capital in the digital era Also Read: Why IPv4 could be worth $60 trillion: Evaluating the debate over digital asset value The debate over digital sovereignty has broader implications for global governance, technology policy and geopolitical competition. As states increasingly seek to assert control over data flows, digital infrastructure and platform governance, the notion of sovereignty in cyberspace has become a rallying point for policy initiatives in many jurisdictions — including the European Union’s push for “digital sovereignty” in areas like cloud computing, artificial intelligence and data protection.
Key Points
- The concept of digital sovereignty, as often invoked by states and regional blocs, is fundamentally flawed because cyberspace lacks enforceable authority and unified jurisdiction.
- Misunderstanding digital sovereignty can deepen governance conflicts over infrastructure such as IP resources and regional Internet registries.
Actions
Pending intelligence enrichment.
