In the early 1990s, Nicholas Negroponte, the founder of MIT Media Lab, heralded that the internet would “flatten organizations, globalize society, decentralize control, and help harmonize people.” Thirty years later, this prediction could not be further from the truth. While the internet has led to unprecedented globalization, innovation, and participation in sectors previously inaccessible, in the last two decades, slow and persistent efforts by governments across the world have reigned private technological pursuits into national regulatory and security regimes. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine marks the next turning point away from the international, distributed, and libertarian internet dreams of the 20th century. The war has accelerated three significant trends in the internet’s geopolitical dynamic, making any major reversals unimaginable. First, the war has accelerated the unprecedented prominence of non-state actors in state-level war. Second, it has highlighted the centrality of information networks to physical conflicts. Third, it has accelerated the global fragmentation between the United States, Europe, Russia, and China along technology platforms. At a United Nations conference in June, a Google executive predicted that Russian operations in Ukraine are foreshadowing the new global status quo: “It is essentially our crystal ball for what is likely to come.” For the majority of modern history, war has been primarily the domain of nation states. Ivan Sigal has argued that, since the 1970s, “there has been a progression of undeclared conflicts, intrastate and civil conflicts that involve irregular fighters and non-state combatants, with fighting occurring in the midst of civilian life, where the majority of victims are noncombatants.” While non-state actors have taken part in past conflicts — the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) began during the Crimean War in the 1850s and modern terror is rooted in anti-colonial rebellions of the 19th century — particularly in the last 20 years, the presence of NGOs, international organizations, and terrorist groups has started to usurp the state monopoly on violence. Joseph Nye and Robert Keohane described this emerging world of international relations as one of “complex interdependence.” Interdependent, because during the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Mali, states waged national wars against armed autonomous organizations, spectated by a motley array of independent observers, and supported on the peripheries in peace efforts by hundreds of NGOs. Complex, because the line between aggressor and peace-builder has blurred. The internet has rendered global conflict even more anarchically complex and interdependent, because of the unprecedented range of interventions available. Even before Russia's invasion of Ukraine, a decentralized community of researchers was ringing alarm bells about the abnormal movement of Russian troops along the Ukrainian borders. The proliferation of satellites, social media, public flight records, and mapping techniques has made available a world of open source reporting methods, capable of identifying war patterns before any shots are actually fired. The rising interdependence of global networks, and unbridled access to them from anywhere in the world, has also meant that one can wage war in Eastern Europe from an apartment in Berlin or a coffee shop in Shenzhen. In February, the Ukrainian government made a global appeal to hacking groups for help in defending critical infrastructure. Since then, an unidentified group of hacking vigilantes have been disrupting Russian news channels, government websites, and military supply networks. Simultaneously, unidentified hacking groups have started increasingly targeting “foreign ministries of NATO states, humanitarian organizations, think tanks, IT groups and energy suppliers.” Western intelligence agencies have attributed the attacks to state-backed Russian groups, but the nature of the internet makes final attribution impossible. Finally, the war has given a new significance to technology platforms. Microsoft’s Seattle-based Threat Intelligence Center has successfully prevented crippling attacks on Kyiv’s military and government networks. Google and Meta have banned Russian media outlets, defending against Moscow’s major influence operation abroad, and giving prominence to Ukrainian voices. A US facial recognition company, Clearview AI, has donated their software to Ukraine’s Ministry of Defense in order to identify dead soldiers. As technology platforms face anti-trust lawsuits in Europe and the United States, the war in Ukraine has served as a convenient new argument against further anti-trust action: harming the tech platforms would help Russian propaganda.