From .com to .gov: The internet's inevitable nationalist turn

This essay examines Iran's most extensive internet disruption since 2022, imposed during the June 2025 conflict with Israel, when missile strikes quickly evolved into coordinated cyberattacks on banking, radar, and communications systems. Drawing from direct experience during the blackout, it traces how connectivity collapsed through staged throttling, protocol suppression, and full reliance on the National Information Network. What began as a technical containment strategy also became an improvised shield against foreign intrusion - one shaped as much by sanctions-driven hardware shortages and reliance on insecure gray-market equipment as by military calculus. By situating Iran's shutdown alongside wartime digital restrictions in places like Ukraine, the essay reframes shutdowns as contested acts of defense in a securitised internet. It explores how the shift from an open, decentralised network toward nationalised, politically bordered infrastructures is accelerating under the pressures of war, sanctions, and private platform power. Ultimately, it argues that the "state of exception" once theorised by Schmitt and Agamben is becoming the default operating mode online, eroding universal digital rights. In such moments, ideals like internet freedom survive only if continuously defended and reinvented, even when survival demands compromises unthinkable in peacetime.