Internet Fragmentation in the Black Sea Region: What We Presented at Our ICANN-Funded Briefing

On 18 September 2026, the Scientific Cyber Security Association (SCSA) held a virtual briefing for internet service providers, government and regulatory bodies, and international and regional organizations working across the Black Sea basin. This is the first large-scale project regarding the Internet Fragmentation, which at the same time is the first project funded by ICANN in the region. The goal of the project is to analyze the fragmentation process in the Black Sea Region, main trends, challenges, influence on internet connectivity and critical infrastructure and develop practical recommendations to challenge the issue at hand. The results of the project, the mathematical models and analytical frameworks can be scaled to global context

The session presented findings from our ongoing ICANN-funded research into internet fragmentation in the region - its technical, political-legal, economic, and socio-cultural dimensions, the infrastructure risks behind it, and what the region's stakeholders can do about it.

Four ways the internet fragments

Fragmentation isn't one problem - it's four, and they don't move in sync. Our framework, adapted from DeNardis (2014) and Mueller (2017), tracks:

• Technical— inconsistent DNS behavior, routing manipulation, and divergent network standards
• Political/legal — regulation, censorship, and data-localization law
• Economic/market — ISP monopolies, infrastructure asymmetries, and sanctions
• Socio-cultural — linguistic divides and platform fragmentation across information ecosystems

We scored each dimension across eight countries — Georgia, Bulgaria, Romania, Türkiye, Ukraine, Russia, Armenia, and Azerbaijan — using a Composite Fragmentation Index built from document analysis, quantitative indicators (RIPE Atlas, OONI, IODA, ITU, Freedom House), expert interviews with ISPs and regulators, and media/discourse analysis.

What the region's own operators and regulators told us

A few numbers stood out from our interviews:

• 66.7% of ISPs cite government regulation and censorship as the top driver of fragmentation
• 86% of public-sector respondents cite national-security policy as their top driver
• 72% of public-sector respondents are unsure whether fragmentation is even occurring in their own country
• 100% support strengthening cross-sector dialogue

That last figure is the one we think matters most going forward - there's no disagreement that the conversation needs to happen, even where there's real uncertainty about the problem itself.

The infrastructure risk underneath it all

Data crosses the Black Sea through a small number of submarine cables and landing stations - Poti, Anaklia, Varna, Constanța, Sinop, Novorossiysk, and Sochi - each one a single point of failure. We modeled three disruption scenarios against this infrastructure:

• SCN-01 - Kinetic conflict & cable sabotage: naval mines or hybrid-warfare sabotage forcing traffic through Russia or Iran, with recovery potentially taking months given restricted access for repair vessels
• SCN-02 - Cyber collapse of landing stations: a coordinated attack on landing-station management systems that leaves cables intact but hijacks BGP routing — including the real, active Georgia–Bulgaria cable route
• SCN-03 - Seismic & ecological disruption: an earthquake along the Anatolian or Caucasus fault lines, worsened by the Black Sea's anoxic seabed chemistry

Layered on top of the physical risk is a legal one: UNCLOS grants freedom to lay and maintain submarine cables on the high seas, but the Montreux Convention's restrictions on non-Black-Sea-state naval and technical vessels can slow a repair response during military escalation - and covert sabotage is notoriously hard to attribute under international law.

Three pillars for building resilience

We proposed three directions for the region

1. Diversify (synchronizing submarine cables, the southern terrestrial corridor via Türkiye, and LEO satellite networks like Starlink and OneWeb)
2. Ally (a Black Sea Digital Security Alliance for joint maritime monitoring and cyber-incident information sharing)
3. Localize (regional sovereign cloud and data-caching infrastructure so basin countries retain some digital autonomy under prolonged disconnection).

What's next

This briefing is one step in a 24-month research program. We've already published three papers under the ICANN grant, with two more accepted and one under review — covering everything from rule-based IP fragmentation detection to the formal RAITM governance model. A full written report is in preparation.

We've also opened a research feedback questionnaire for the stakeholders who joined us, with a particular focus on validating our three disruption scenarios against real operational experience. If you work in ISP operations, regulation, or regional cybersecurity and want to weigh in before we finalize the report, reach out to us.