The Internet Has Borders

My best friend Colette and I built our first website when we were about 10. Both our dads believed in the democratisation the early internet offered and wanted to give us the tools to participate. Written in a text editor with HTML, inline CSS and graphics made in ClarisWorks. Call me nostalgic, but I’ve always preferred a digital presence that is hand-coded. 

But this isn’t just personal preference. In fact, hand-coding meant autonomy, understanding and experimentation. For me, it was a form of creative expression and technical empowerment.

About two years ago, though, clients and collaborators started asking for something more "professional". They wanted to navigate the standardised portfolio format that has become ubiquitous in the creative industries.

Over the years I’ve tried them all: Squarespace, ReadyMag, Cargo. They all inject nonsensical code to run, making it impossible to truly customize. Eventually, I relented and signed a two-year subscription with Wix.

A couple of months later, Wix was put on the BDS (Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions) list – a global Palestinian-led movement that calls for economic and political pressure on companies and institutions complicit in Israel’s violations of international law. Wix had fired a Dublin employee for posting in solidarity with Palestinian people – for calling Israel's actions in Gaza “indiscriminate bombing”.

Unable to exit my subscription early, I built and began directing people to a new single-page site, hosted on a server I still maintained. Thankfully, that Wix subscription has finally ended. I won't be going back.

What does it mean to choose where your website lives? The choice to self-host isn’t just technical – it’s ethical, political and philosophical. 

Mine sits across several countries. I have a Swedish domain, because the TLD (top-level domain) happens to be the last two letters of my name: annaro.se.

Although “cloud hosting” suggests my website floats in some ephemeral sky, the actual data sits on chips in France. The hosting company is registered in Ireland, and I’ve never updated my contact information (which still lists me as living in New Zealand).

I upload updates to my .html file from the United Kingdom. And use an email service based in the US. These countries are not neutral. As such, digital neutrality is also a myth.

The .yu domain outlived the former country of Yugoslavia by 20 years, maintained by professors in Belgrade who refused to let it die. Thousands of websites documented the war, preserved personal accounts of NATO bombing, and hosted academic exchanges during the siege.

Then ICANN (the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers), the nonprofit responsible for managing the global domain name system, decided .yu had no right to exist. On March 30th 2010, they deleted it all. When Yugoslavia fractured, so did its digital presence. 

Artist Kaloyan Kolev calls this “the confiscation of digital memory”. Although digital borders may be invisible, they're no less real than physical ones. They reflect the same tensions, violence and histories of erasure. 

The tiny island nation of Tuvalu owns .tv – those fortuitous two letters fund an entire nation facing displacement by rising seas. Entertainment companies pay millions for domains that could soon vanish underwater. Tuvalu is a nesting doll of colonialism, governed by Aotearoa, which remains a constitutional monarchy under the British Crown.

Underwater internet infrastructure was built on the maps of The All Red Line – the telegraph network that connected Britain to all its colonies without touching “foreign” soil. Named for the red colour used on imperial maps, which artist Evan Roth traces in his Red Lines project – a series of videos filmed along the physical routes of submarine cables, offering a meditative reflection on the hidden geopolitical landscape of the internet.

I’ve written before about how we need common symbols for the internet. Thinking of it as having a specific colour could help us have meaningful conversations about its physical realities.

The so-called World Wide Web doesn’t transcend geography. Instead, it amplifies existing power relationships through the very cables that carry our data. The Houthis know this when they target underwater cables. The citizens of Gaza feel this when the internet there is cut.

These aren’t abstract geopolitical games – they’re demonstrations of who controls the cables and protocols we’ve come to depend on. Amazon Web Services hosts a third of the internet. Google controls email protocols. 

When Cloudflare removed 8chan after mass shootings, they succeeded where governments had failed – notably through corporate decision-making rather than public accountability. When cables get cut, when domains get deleted, when platforms change policies overnight – the internet reveals its politics.

Tech infrastructure is never just infrastructure. It's a system of values, decisions and consequences. Paradoxically, the same companies monopolising internet infrastructure are now distributing tools that could democratise everything. You don’t need my dad’s help anymore. AI can teach anyone to code. To configure servers. To manage domains.

But convenience remains seductive. Off-the-shelf solutions reduce the endless labour of digital self-presentation. And let’s be honest: everyone hates updating their portfolio.

Projects like The HTML Review, The School of Poetic Computation and Naive Yearly celebrate a different kind of internet – one where websites resist algorithmic optimisation. Personal sites that choose individual expression and code as craft. The 737 artistic websites listed in the recently released Internet Phone Book by SEED CLUB member Kristoffer Tjalve are evidence not of what we’re losing, but of what we could gain.

Websites can be resistance, aesthetic, technical and political. They can reflect our values, our histories, our futures. The platforms we choose, the code we write, the companies we support – it all carries political weight. There’s no neutral ground in how we build and inhabit digital spaces. 

Every conscious choice about digital infrastructure becomes a vote for the internet we want to inhabit. The question isn’t whether to engage with these politics – it’s how consciously we participate.