▲ 509 points
back
522 comments
I don't think cutting of Russia from the internet is a good solution at all. It will isolate them enough to allow the government to push an anti-western agenda.
They need to see the misery of the war they are inflicting and the only way is via an open internet. Yes they will push their own propaganda to the west but we can deal with that.
Fire-walling them off will result in the people not knowing what is going on. Just look how China is able to hide what happened at Tienanmen square.
We can not allow Russia to run the narrative by cutting of the internet. We need our pictures and videos to reach them.
Plus think about the precedent being set here. Punishing civilians for the actions of its government is absolutely insane and will backfire badly.
Should the global community have targeted all Americans for the actions of the Bush Presidency invading Iraq under false pretenses? Or how about Vietnam?
Realize that our next Iraq or Vietnam this new standard could be applied to us or any other country. Will bloodthirsty Twitter be cheering on the digital and economic destruction of civilians then? Cooler heads need to start prevailing.
I agree that cutting off the country in general is really bad idea. What I would support is not announcing Russian government owned IP blocks outside of the country. It would exclusively punish official Russian government institutions and potentially cause issues for any officials abroad (think VPN connections).
It would have zero impact on normal residential and business internet connections inside the country, and would not impact anything sovereign within the country itself. It likely wouldn't prevent the government from getting and using the general internet as they'd just have to switch over to a normal business account, but their hosted services can't switch that quickly.
I would feel really bad for the IT staff that had to figure that out and work around it...
Which is why it really surprised me when I learned that Disney had decided to leave the Russian market a couple of days ago. For whomever lived East of the Well pre-1990 (I did grow up as a kid in Ceausescu's Romania) it is well known that things like Disney/Hollywood movies (that were still circulating in a sort of samizdat way) and mundane consumer products like Coca-Cola or Levi's did a lot more at bringing the Wall down than the entire US nuclear arsenal.
Thank you ICANN for a sane decision. If Russia gets cut from the Internet, a precedent would have been firmly established. It will be pretty clear that every nation has to build its own independent internet. The global internet will then eventually be on the path to become a legacy architecture.
More importantly, it would have set a precedent that nobody could want.
Did seeing the misery of war trigger Americans to against their government during Afghanistan/Iraq?
The only losses televised were American soldiers. People are nationalistic to the bone.
> The Iraq Body Count project documents 185,000–208,000 violent civilian deaths through February 2020 in their table.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casualties_of_the_Iraq_War
> About 241,000 people have been killed in the Afghanistan and Pakistan war zone since 2001. More than 71,000 of those killed have been civilians.
https://watson.brown.edu/costsofwar/costs/human/civilians/af...
I agree with you on that. Isolating them or ourselves from them will only trigger those who're already vulnerable to extremism to be become even more extreme.
That's exactly right, the internet is a lifeline for both distribution of the real information about the current events and a powerful coordination tool for the opposition and the human rights groups such as https://ovdinfo.org/ that are providing free legal help to the 7670 people already arrested during the anti war demonstrations in Russia. Shutting it all the down would leave russia with state media and gov narrative only.
There are rumors that Russia is about to cut themselves off the internet exactly because of this reason, any day from now.
They have been preparing for it for many years, and they had an exercise in 2021, which was based on the law introduced in 2019.
https://www.reuters.com/technology/russia-disconnected-globa...
I obviously support Ukraine in their fight against invaders (and I am Russian born), but cutting the internet from Russia would be actually more useful for the Russian government than Ukraine. Russian government just today closed the last independent radio station, blocked the website of an independent tv station , so blocking the internet would just be applauded by the Russian state for doing what they wanted to do themselves.
Regardless of how we feel about the current conflict between the countries, it is absolutely essential to keep the internet open and accessible to everyone, including those who we don't agree with.
See also, the maps from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_reactions_to_the...
While most countries took a pro-Ukraine stance, there's a non-negligible amount of neutral countries. In particular are India and China. I'm sure they wont be very happy if IANA effectively breaks their internet connectivity to Russia.
> ICANN's rejection of Ukraine's request to sever Russia from the internet
Isn't that headline patently false clickbait? The second paragraph:
"You have asked that ICANN target Russia’s access to the Internet by revoking specific countrycode top-level domains operated from within Russia, arranging the revocation of SSL certificates issued within those domains, and shutting down a subset of root servers located in Russia."
Still surprises me all the bans imposed to Russia. Never heard of such a thing with regards (to mention something recent) Israel attacks on Palestine. It is definitely one thing to attack a European country a total different one to attack some other third-world country.
Are they going to ask the ITU to revoke the +7 dialing code next? And then ask the UPU stop mail delivery to Russia?
I think they made the correct decision here... These are the kind of foundational decisions that impact the direction of the internet as a whole. Starting a precedent for politicization is dangerous idea.
I support fighting propaganda with better more believable information. Censoring information is not the answer.
I am Polish. When Polish people revolted against Soviets it was because we have seen better life was possible. It was exactly because we had access to alternate message.
I don't think cutting off a country in a situation like that is helpful at all. If anything, it is making it easier for pro-Putin propaganda.
I would also remind that Russia itself build capability to cut itself off from the Internet. Yes, we would be doing them a favour because right now they might hesitate to do it by themselves fearing backlash from people who do not care about politics or anybody else at all but do care about having Internet access.
This is pretty much an open and shut case. The precedent of ICANN taking any form of regulatory stance would be enough to tear apart the fabric of the entire internet. We would inevitably silo off into parallel networks between the various competing ideologies of the world, and polarization would go exponential.
Oof. This is definitely the right response. That would be a powerful, terrible precedent to set — one that could be catastrophic if turned toward a different country perhaps
If ICANN took a side in this, then in a year there won't be an ICANN. There will be several miniCANNs catering to different countries (at least the large ones).
Thank goodness for such a levelheaded response. Phew.
The sanctions can backfire spectacularly, as they often do, leading to mass suffering and isolation for the populace, further radicalization of the leadership, and less reason for compromise as economic/cultural entanglements are severed.
Information is the antidote to war. Don't cut it off.
ICANN should strive to be as neutral as it possibly can. Very glad they rejected this.
Russia has state sponsored hackers who's only goal in life is to ddos / disrupt / destroy the internet.
Why would the internet entertain a country that has set its mind on destroying it?
The only argument I see in comments is that letting Russian citizens get on VK is more important than allowing Ukrainian citizens to communicate and organise evacuations before the Russian tanks turn up. Are you all on crack or something?
Another ugly face of war. Paralympic ban: https://www.cnn.com/europe/live-news/ukraine-russia-putin-ne....
as I wrote elsewhere. removing the resolution of .ru isn't cutting them off from the internet. It just makes it much harder for them to spread their propaganda. Anyone in russia could still resolve www.cnn.com and the like.
The only Q would be would Russia retaliate by going all china with a great firewall, thereby them actually severing themselves from the internet.
If we learned one thing from Corona pandemic, please take away that censorship make things worse, both public and private platforms.
Never thought I'd see the day when Russian "Sovereign RUnet" project would actually start making sence.
Sanctions are necessary to hold back the steppe warlord sitting in the Kremlin.
For humanitarian reasons we should make it easy for Russians to defect to the west if they want no part in what the Russian state is doing.
I don’t want to economically hurt Russian civilians more than we really need to in order to save Ukraine.
I agree 100% with ICANN's position in this matter. I think their reply was level headed and correct.
The West is quick to abandon their own ideals.
All the Western cutting ties with Russia has made most people I know (we are all Chinese) much more favorable towards the Great Firewall. If the West cut the ties with China, the damage is much less given that we are already in an effective LAN.
The internet should remain a neutral communications platform. Once we start politicizing it the dream will die pretty quickly and we get segregated networks which don't interoperate or only though heavily policed gateways.
Didn't America win the cold war because of cultural influence? Doesn't cutting Russia off also cut out that cultural influence.
Does a side benefit come with a differently censored internet Russia provides where copyright is ignored?
Can't blame Ukraine for trying.
Would it be easier to appeal directly to Tier 1 networks instead?
Is Ukrainian request to cancel Russian Internet a Russian psyop to discredit Ukraine? How do we know the comments in this thread are not psyop in defense of Russia having internet access? Hard to know who to trust anymore.
Why "cut them off" rather than mark all ru originating traffic with a specific header/tag? That way, consumers can decide whether to reject that traffic or not.
I'd also support individual services extending this to e.g. tagging user accounts. That way you could:
- mark posts in forums based on if they originated in ru i.e. better detection of Russian bots/shills in forums where Russian-based participation doesn't make a lot of sense.
- firewall forums s.t. different groups of users cannot see each other.
I think it's important to recognize that some things in the world are inherently individual-centric and cross all arbitrary political boundaries and the Internet has become one. Even during the world wars postal service and telegraph service was maintained, notably with censorship imposed. We don't fight genocidal wars in large part; the people communicating with each other across battle lines will still be friends, family, or coworkers when the war is resolved.
War has changed significantly with modern communication and there aren't many wartime secrets any more; troop movements and logistics are readily seen from satellites and aircraft. It's arguable that censoring communication between countries at war has no practical war benefit.
As a sanction it is also arguably not effective because as an example North Korea enforces extreme Internet censorship and this hardship on North Korean citizens does not meaningfully weaken the regime. If anything, maintaining open communication to combat propaganda is likely the most beneficial approach. There's a video circulating of a captured Russian soldier in Ukraine face-timing his mother in Russia which would have been blocked by severing Russia from the Internet, to what end? Further isolating and estranging neighbors and family during a time of extreme stress? Finding common shared humanity is always more important than tactical warfare because it usually obviates the need for continued warfare.
Well, we've been using infrastructure (like DNS) as a weapon for a decent time. I still remember when CloudFlare decided to drop Storm Front thinking... They've opened Pandora's box. I suppose this is just the next step.
Sad that it has to get this far for people to suddenly get squeamish about it.
Another source: https://www.thehindubusinessline.com/info-tech/icann-decline...
But very unsurprising. [0] It really was expected to be rejected. I mean just look at this extremely weak 'reason' from [1]:
> All of these measures will help users seek for reliable information in alternative domain zones, preventing propaganda and disinformation.
Just like how RIPE [2] took a neutral stance, there would be no chance ICANN would bend and take a side in this either.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30509849
ICANN won't do it. But an intermediary resolver, such as Quad9, can choose to drop requests it deems unsuitable. They do that all the time with domains connected to malware.
Has anyone talked about doing that?
I understand that it is possible to physically isolate a region from the internet. But, how can one do this 'logically'? Is there an international organization that can do so? How?
Maybe if Ukraine sends a bribe their way it'll happen. That's usually how things go with ICANN.
But cutting Russia off from the Internet isn't a good idea.
This is an interesting approach to modern war. Let's say hypothetically the western countries (US, Canada, EU) go to war with eastern countries (Russia, China, North Korea). Western countries could levy a strong impact by pulling internet service. This may inadvertently help eastern countries by blocking Twitter, Tik Tok, etc. but would also mean that AliExpress and many eastern markets are immediately cut off from that supply chain.
North Korea is a bad example here since they have little internet or trade, but included them anyways.
I wonder how big thre effects were if somehow cloudflare or aws decided to stop serving to Russia (or another country).
Consider always the ramifications of defeat. If Russia shows nothing truly matters against them. If nuclear weapons are all anyone makes a decision based on then only nuclear weapons matter. Do you think China is watching this? Duh. Do you think that translates to further invasions? Duh.
The barrel of options against Russia needs to be exhausted. The only way to stop a bully such as this is to hit them the hardest, most brutal way, earliest. Putin and anyone supporting him should have been routed in the early 2000s. This decision here is nothing short of appeasement.
Ukraine needs help, they are getting desperate. Yes, they're standing and pushing back even, but Russians kill so many civilians... I don't think world can afford to watch how it's just being destroyed like this. Russian people are brainwashed and are under military occupation right now, they can't effectively overthrow this government. All the Putin's cronies are locked with him in a bunker, under complete control. This is a bad situation from all angles.