On a hot sandy beach in Lagos, a huge sea monster waddles out of the blue water towards the city.
Its eel shape is thin - about the size of a garden hose - but in length it has no equal.
From one end to the other, it is 45.000 kilometers long.
It could wrap around the entire planet.
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2Africa is the largest undersea internet cable of all time.
It was built for four years and cost at least one billion dollars, and will connect Europe, Asia and Africa.
It will improve internet capacity and vital resilience to protect the free flow of traffic for 33 countries with 46 separate rest stops.
Parts of the cable are already operational, but the whole thing won't be finished until next year.
This high-tech cable will enable more Internet capacity than all the submarine cables currently serving Africa.
It is the most ambitious internet project of all time with money and expertise from various countries and internet giants such as Meta, China Mobile and Vodafone.
Ambitious projects such as 2Africa they contributed to 70 percent of the world's population being online.
From sending emails to watching online videos - we all depend on submarine cables every day.
Sometimes the connection of an entire country depends on a small number of cables that can sometimes break.
Fishing incidents, earthquakes, landslides and sometimes even suspected sabotage - there are many ways our internet connection can be compromised.
But the biggest threat and the biggest growth comes from governments themselves.
Annual data collected from connectivity researchers at TOP10VPN shows that the trend of shutdowns - when the internet is deliberately turned off in a country or region - is on the rise.
Watch the video: How to turn off the Internet
India is leading the way with constant Internet shutdown tactics for everything from preventing exam cheating to controlling insurgency.
This map shows how internet shutdowns have increased over the past five years, from 2019 to 2023.
The redder the country, the more shutdowns it has experienced.
Light yellow countries had between one and five shutdowns.
The reddest countries had at least 20 shutdowns.
2019, the map of intentional shutdowns of the Internet according to TOP10VPN
2023. year, a map of intentional shutdowns of the Internet according to TOP10VPN
According to the researchers, the number of intentional shutdowns has increased over the past five years, with 2023 being the worst so far.
- 2019: 134 shutdowns
- 2020: 93 shutdowns
- 2021: 57 shutdowns
- 2022: 130 shutdowns
- 2023: 225 shutdowns
India has by far the most shutdowns of any country, and leaders increasingly see the Internet not as a right of citizens but as an instrument of government.
Things have gotten so serious that the United Nations said last year that "it may be time to strengthen Internet access as a human right, not just a privilege."
Watch the video: What happens when the Internet goes down
And it's not just shutdowns.
Censorship of websites and services is also on the rise.
This next map tracks the decline in internet freedom over the past five years based on a score given by the researcher - the redder the country, the worse things are according to Freedom House, which analyzes countries based on censorship, surveillance and how much websites are blocked.
Internet freedom in 2019. according to the index table of Freedom House
Internet of Freedom 2023. years. according to the index table of Freedom House
Researchers say internet freedoms have been in decline for 13 years in a row.
Iran and Myanmar have seen the most recent declines, while China remains by far the worst online environment.
It is not only pessimists who claim that the Internet as we know it is dying.
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But why?
Experts say that this trend is purely one-way because the tools to control the Internet have multiplied, and governments are changing to avoid using them.
"There was an early ecstatic discourse about the Internet as a global space that would be beyond the reach of government control and the same for everyone, but that has always been a bit of a fantasy," says Jackie Kerr, a senior research fellow at the National Defense University.
Kerr says the fantasy stemmed in part from a misunderstanding of how the technology actually works.
Former US President Bill Clinton, for example, described the attempt to control how people use the internet as "trying to nail pudding to the wall".
"It was only a matter of time before the authorities gained more control and learned how to orchestrate things so that they could enforce the rule of law online," says Kerr.
China was a pioneer in Internet control, and it achieved this by building expensive hardware and software solutions to erect its Great Firewall.
It has also hired an army of internet watchdogs to monitor what people are sharing and discussing in order to censor the internet live.
Tools became cheaper and it became easier for other countries to follow in her footsteps.
Russia, for example, has been working on a much cheaper alternative for years by building its own Domain Name System, often described as the Internet's telephone directory, which will effectively cut it off from the main international Internet.
Russia has dropped two points on the internet freedom index since the full invasion of Ukraine.
And the others are carefully watching what is happening.
"Digital authoritarianism is on the rise," says Marva Fatafta of the internet rights group Access Nau.
For example, Saudi Arabia - one of the beneficiaries of 2Africa which arrived in its capital Riyadh in February - runs a restricted and censored version of the internet where voices of rebellion can be punished, which they often are.
The country also passed a law that obliges companies to enter into contracts with the government to have a regional presence in the country.
Similar rules have been introduced in Turkey, Jordan, India and Germany.
The consequence is that Internet companies are much more inclined to comply with censorship for legal or political reasons.
"I definitely see it as a growing threat," says Marva Fatafta of Exes Nau.
She says they are now seeing many different forms of control on the rise around the world.
Following the example of China, countries are trying to completely replace the influence of the Western Internet.
For years, Russia has encouraged the growth of its rival apps.
Yandex threatened Google and Uber.
VK grew while Facebook declined.
RuTjub is the answer to YouTube.
But since the full invasion and perceived bias against Russia, the Kremlin has been aggressively working to block and squeeze out these American firms.
India has also banned many Chinese apps from its app stores amid rising geopolitical tensions.
With its huge population, India will influence what shape the next era of the Internet will take.
But some Western countries are also experiencing a trend toward a less open and less free Internet.
The US plan to ban TikTok on cybersecurity grounds comes after the Chinese-owned app threatened the dominance of US social networks.
With the explosion of other Chinese platforms such as shopping sites Temu and Shein, could the US, the bastion of Internet ideals, block even those sites from its citizens?
And so, even as amazing feats of engineering help connect us better, the Internet is more fragmented and fractured than ever before.
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