Digital sovereignty is about resilience, including blocking cyber threats

Canada is building domestic digital infrastructure and deepening ties with like-minded allies. But that doesn’t automatically make your online experience more secure. So what does resilience look like for you? One answer works quietly in the background whenever you go online.

*This post is supported by a sponsorship agreement with CIRA, the not-for-profit best known for managing the .CA domain and for championing a secure, accessible internet for all Canadians.

The internet is one of the most fundamental spaces in our modern society.

Our economic activities, healthcare, banking, and day-to-day communications all run on it. Outage incidents like the faulty CrowdStrike update in 2024, and numerous global disruptions of cloud services in 2025 reveal how much a handful of tech giants—mostly US-based—dominate our digital ecosystem and cloud infrastructure.

From dependent to resilient

For decades, Canada’s infrastructure has been deeply integrated with that of the United States. Everything from telecommunications to shared data centres and fibre optic lines. Internet traffic routing in particular favours north-south connections in many cases because of infrastructure buildout choices made in calmer times.

Over 25% of Canada’s domestic internet traffic takes a “boomerang” route through the US, because it is often more cost-effective and technically efficient for data to travel south before returning to our borders. But as geopolitical tension with our southern neighbour continues to grow, Canadians are realizing how vulnerable we are without a resilient digital ecosystem.

Digital sovereignty has become a ‘national project’ that justifies a lot of the initiatives that could help “build Canada strong.” Our government has pledged to build a “Canadian sovereign cloud,” and launched a Sovereign AI Compute Strategy to support the construction of AI-specific data centres and supercomputing infrastructure. In the “AI for All” national strategy, our government ties high-capacity fibre and satellite networks to resilience against disruption.

In September, Prime Minister Mark Carney announced federal financing and new tax incentives to expand the broadband backbone that connects Canadians from “coast to coast to coast.” This includes building domestic infrastructure nationwide and adding direct links to Europe and Asia. 

Missing a big piece in the mix

Our government seems to see digital sovereignty through building infrastructure, but how does it translate into resilience? And when it comes to resilience in a digital ecosystem, cybersecurity is a core part of that mix—but this aspect seems to be overlooked in the national conversation so far. AI is making cyberattacks faster and easier to carry out—and it goes out of control sometimes.

This summer, hundreds of AI agents have gone rogue in an internal test of an OpenAI model and broke into Hugging Face’s systems on its own. Now, OpenAI, Anthropic, and other American AI giants are preparing for the “possibility of a catastrophic AI-driven cyberattack” that could cripple banks, hospitals, water plants, power systems, and internet infrastructure.

This month, AI tools surfaced critical PHP vulnerabilities in a popular open-source server-side programming language used in web development for decades. PHP powers roughly 70% of the world’s websites, so a flaw this serious could expose a huge share of the web to potential hacks. The meltdown showed how AI makes system vulnerabilities more exploitable.

If Canada wants true digital sovereignty that provides the kind of resilience we envision, we need to put more effort into more than just building infrastructure.

Sovereignty, resilience and autonomy

Canada isn’t alone in the push for digital autonomy. The EU, the Netherlands, and other democracies are reclaiming their digital autonomy from Big Tech, and Canada is deepening ties with them for more cooperation. The recently announced Canada-EU Alliance for the Future introduces joint initiatives on new subsea cables and satellite connectivity. But we can’t build resilience through infrastructure alone; it also comes down to the everyday choices we make to stay safe online.

One of the quietest is your DNS, every time you visit a website, your device uses DNS to look up where to find it. Whoever answers that lookup can see which sites you are browsing. That’s why who runs your DNS resolver and what they do with your data matters!

A protective DNS like CIRA Canadian Shield  blocks known malicious sites before they load on your devices. While it is not designed to catch all cyber threats online, if you’re using CIRA Canadian Shield on your devices and visiting a legitimate website that has already been turned into a hub for malware or phishing scams (and flagged by the blocklists exchanged by the threat intelligence), it blocks you from reaching the compromised domains and stops you from falling prey to hackers.

Resilience starts from the bottom up

Since early 2025, close to 12,000 OpenMedia community members have urged the Canadian government to strengthen Canadian networks and regulations to protect Canadians’ data. To our community, digital sovereignty also means giving Canadians control over ‘black box’ algorithmic systems, reclaiming our ‘digital selves’ from foreign tech giants and monopoly abuse, and defending Canadians’ choices.

Pushing for policy change matters, but it isn’t the only way to act. Digital sovereignty is also built from the choices we make as individuals about whose tools we trust.

CIRA Canadian Shield is one of those choices. It is a free protective DNS service run by CIRA, the Canadian not-for-profit organization best known for managing the .CA domain and for championing a secure, accessible internet for all Canadians. It serves over 3 million users and blocks over 300 million threats a month, all with a clear commitment to protecting your privacy. CIRA doesn’t sell, rent, or license your personal information, and it keeps query data for 24 hours at most. There’s no sign-up and no subscription. Your data is not the product––free means free!

One tool won’t make Canada sovereign. But choosing a Canadian, not-for-profit service to handle your DNS is a small step toward the resilience and control we envision, and toward standing alongside allies who are doing the same. Get it for your mobile devices, desktops, or as a browser extension today!