Belarus has again landed near the bottom of the world's internet freedom rankings, scoring just 21 out of 100 points in Freedom House's newly released Freedom on the Net 2026 report. Only five countries fared worse: Cuba, Russia, China, Iran and Myanmar. The finding confirms a now-familiar pattern - Belarus posted the identical score last year, suggesting that whatever modest shifts occurred in its digital environment were not enough to move the needle.
A Shrinking but Telling Global Picture
This year's edition covers 38 countries, a sharp contraction from previous editions after Freedom House suspended assessments of 34 nations. The organization did not frame this as a retreat from the problem; rather, the remaining dataset still captures the broad contours of a sixteen-year decline in global internet freedom, a trend now long enough to be considered structural rather than cyclical. At the top of the table sit Estonia, Costa Rica, Taiwan, Australia, France, South Africa, the United Kingdom, the United States and Argentina - a geographically diverse group that nonetheless shares strong legal protections for expression, relatively transparent content-moderation rules, and limited state interference in network infrastructure. Ukraine, notably, sits in the middle tier, classified as partly free, a status shaped by the practical realities of operating digital infrastructure amid an active war.
Why Authoritarian States Keep Losing Ground
The report identifies a deliberate strategy among authoritarian governments: isolating domestic populations from the global internet rather than merely monitoring them. This can take the form of national intranets, mandatory data localization, blocked foreign platforms, or throttled connections during politically sensitive moments. Belarus has employed several of these tools in recent years, alongside prosecutions tied to online speech and pressure on independent media operating from abroad. The effect is cumulative - each new restriction narrows the space for independent information while making circumvention technically and legally riskier for ordinary users.
Age Verification and the AI Dilemma
Two newer forces are reshaping the landscape beyond classic censorship. The first is the spread of age-verification requirements for social media, a policy trend gaining traction even in democracies, raising questions about how such systems collect and store identity data. The second is artificial intelligence, which the report treats as a double-edged development. Governments are drafting rules against AI-driven impersonation and harassment, a legitimate response to real harms. But Freedom House warns that similar legal language is being repurposed to suppress legitimate dissent, giving officials a new pretext for takedowns and prosecutions dressed up as consumer protection.
What Comes Next
The report's own framing is pointed: internet freedom, it argues, should guide how societies adapt to agentic AI systems capable of acting independently online. That technology is already altering how information moves and how platforms are governed. For countries like Belarus, already near the bottom of the index, the risk is that AI-era regulation becomes another layer of control rather than a tool for accountability. For freer nations, the challenge is different but related - building rules that curb genuine AI abuses without eroding the open exchange that made their systems the benchmark in the first place.