New Delhi, June 5 -- For 88 days in the Iran War, Iran did not simply restrict the internet; it pushed an entire society of 96 million into digital darkness. Digital businesses collapsed, dissents froze, and the flow of civil-public data was banned. It created an invisible wall that the Western adversaries couldn't break. This explains that, in this new age of digital sovereignty, the most mass-disruptive weapon may not be a missile but a switch.

When international access partially returned, the damage was already done. The blackout has exposed what state sovereignty may look like in the digital age, and the internet is no longer a free public domain. It is infrastructure, battlefields, marketplaces, intelligence, and political weapons a...