Overview

A border you cannot see can still stop you. One click loads for your neighbour and stalls for you; one post trends here and vanishes there. This is a field guide to the new frontiers of control, where platforms and protocols redraw who gets to speak, transact, and belong. You will learn how digital sovereignty and internet sovereignty work in practice, why online censorship often hides behind benign settings, and how platform governance quietly sets norms for millions. With clear frameworks and grounded examples, it explains algorithmic nationalism, ai firewalls, content moderation, and data localisation without jargon. It is for readers who sense that rules are shifting but lack a vocabulary to engage: policy leaders, technologists, journalists, civil society organisers, and informed citizens. Across chapters, you will see how identity checks, inspection tools, and enforcement switches form living borders; how payments, app stores, and ad markets act as customs; and how cross-border data flows and virtual nations complicate old maps. The result is clarity you can use: a way to diagnose problems, spot leverage points, and argue for institutions that protect openness with dignity.

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Ayaan Chowdhury writes about the invisible rules that govern our digital lives. Raised between Kolkata and London, he brings the sociologist's lens to questions usually left to engineers and lawyers, asking not only how systems work but who they serve. At the Oxford Internet Institute, his research explores AI governance and the global digital divide, with a focus on how infrastructure choices shape everyday freedoms. A simple mission drives him: to make complex technology legible to citizens and accountable to the public interest. A childhood memory of crossing India's Howrah Bridge lingers in his work: a reminder that passage is never just a route, but a relationship between power and possibility.

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