[tivert]

> The test is also expected to involve ISPs demonstrating that they can direct data to government-controlled routing points. These will filter traffic so that data sent between Russians reaches its destination, but any destined for foreign computers is discarded.

> Eventually the Russian government wants all domestic traffic to pass through these routing points. This is believed to be part of an effort to set up a mass censorship system akin to that seen in China, which tries to scrub out prohibited traffic.

The internet is fragmenting.

[_wmd]

If you look at the Internet as a kind of cultural propagation weapon (I find it hard not to adopt this perspective given dominance of US content online, and as someone who with seemingly increasing regularity fails to spell in British as opposed to American English), then this outcome is easily seen as only a matter of time, and depending on how severe you interpret the 'threat', kind of long overdue.

[throwaway415415]

There is no way they can afford to fragment the internet. They need open source libraries, they need access to information, they need access to education, etc. If they do that they will gp backward economically.

[biesnecker]

I wish I believed this as strongly as you do. The Chinese internet is isolated in a lot of very meaningful ways and the Chinese economy is not going backwards. There's probably a drag but it's not significant enough to stall progress.

You can unfortunately retain a lot of the utility of the internet while simultaneously sucking out the ability for it to be effectively used for political activity if you're willing to build the infrastructure required.

[Upvoter33]

"There's probably a drag but it's not significant enough to stall progress."

I think it's rather the opposite. Why do you think tencent, alibaba, etc., exist in China, instead of the US alternatives? It's simply because there was a wall in place. Honestly, I'm not sure why more large countries aren't doing this - it's an easy way to build your own digital industry up.

[lainga]

That's the thing - I'm not sure Russia can produce their own competent tencent, alibaba, and so forth. I wonder if they're going to wall off their section of the Internet, then realise it's painful and open themselves up to Chinese companies.

It would be wise for someone in the Russian government to say "You will end up shining the shoes of the Chinese!" a la Italo Balbo at this point.

[Andrex]

Services don't have to be competent to be profitable.

In addition, I'm sure there's enough tech skill and manpower in Russia to create most any web service given enough incentive.

[sangnoir]

VK and Yandex seem to be very well done, competency-wise.

[agent008t]

I would argue it might have happened anyway. It would not have been profitable for US companies to export their services to China due to low (at the time) USD purchasing power of Chinese consumers.

[throwaway415415]

I have a very different vision. It is becoming more and more difficult for China to keep their internet closed.

[batat]

But they're already doing it.

More than 17 millions of IP addresses were blocked in 2018 [1][2] including large segments of Google/Amazon/Azure/DO/Linode etc. Although recently roskomnadzor unblocked most of them (perhaps due to the spread of DPI among internet providers, so they able to deal with https now and act more accurately), but ~800,000 IPs remains blocked. The government doesn't give a shit about creating a bad reputation for online business in Russia. Instead, actively engaged in "import substitution", e.g. making Сhina-like isolated payment card system [3] or spending millions for "national search engine" [4] (currently bankrupt, AFAIK). They are seems to be totally OK with isolation.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/apr/17/russia-blocks-...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_websites_blocked_in_Ru...

[3] https://nspk.com/cards-mir/

[4] https://sputnik.ru/

[tw04]

The government does, sure. And just like China, the appropriate government employees will be given access. But the public? The technical ones will find ways around it and the general populace will just go on without.

[tivert]

> The technical ones will find ways around it

And will be monitored. I've read speculation that some of the popular VPNs that still function reliably in China are likely to be government-controlled.

From an authoritarian's controlling standpoint, it makes sense to deliberately provide some "outlets" to trap the unsophisticated people who want to escape your control. Out of the pan an into the fire, so to speak.

[_wmd]

This is the common line, but where is proof of that? The Internet basically didn't exist 20 years ago, who can possibly say what a long-term plan to unwind from it could look like, and how technical partitioning of the network might effect the business and cultural information flows built on top of it, which will inevitably adapt to cope with that partitioning

[anigbrowl]

LOL they will still have all that

[mikeash]

In retrospect, the old idea that the internet would be above national borders was hilariously naive. It may be a global network, but there’s nothing that says each country can’t exert a lot of control over their little piece of it.

[tialaramex]

The Network, in all its incarnations, is about communicating. When you suppose that you'll gain some small advantage by refusing to communicate, everybody else keeps their advantage and you lose yours. You're cutting your nose off to spite your face. Sometimes it takes a war to learn this lesson temporarily.

The Treaty of Bern is my go-to example. See, after mail ("snail" mail, not email) had been invented countries thought like you did, we must exert our control over this for our own good. So to get a letter from Scotland to Switzerland you'd need to relay it in steps, to enter each country it would need to conform to the laws of that country.

So you'd write a Swiss letter, conforming to Swiss rules with Swiss stamps, you'd place that inside a French letter, with French stamps conveying an instruction to relay it to the Swiss border, and then place that inside a British letter with local postage affixed which asked that it be relayed to France.

This would take considerable time, and failed if the route unexpectedly took your letter to the wrong country. It was a monumental pain in the arse, and for what?

So, the Treaty says No, don't do any of that. Everybody who signs the treaty gets to send and receive letters, it traverses borders, and the costs will all come out in the wash anyway the sending country chooses the pricing and you use their stamps wherever the letter is going. Everybody signed.

[_wmd]

It's frankly a poor analogy, as the treaty of Bern did not enable the masses of the recipient country's children to sit captive for 6 hours every night attached to a glowing box that promoted ideas incompatible with their surrounding culture. The postal system was never used (to my knowledge) to bombard an entire country's citizens with false information about their government during election time, etc. etc.

The Internet is a very different creature to the postal system

[asdff]

>everybody else keeps their advantage and you lose yours.

In the eyes of a despot, the regime gains control and the masses loose coordination. The last thing they want is communication.

[Shivetya]

don't worry, the US political system is doing similar but under the guise of "fake news" and "campaign finance reform".

what doesn't work one way can simply be done another when you convince enough people to be afraid

[Scipio_Afri]

The US political system absolutely is not doing that.

[mg794613]

Why is this person down voted so harshly? It's on topic. It's relevant and to my opinion even correct in mentioning this. Russia does it without shame in the open whereas the western (our) countries achieve this by scaring the people enough "they want it themselves". What's so wrong about that?

[vorpalhex]

Way to hijack a point to crow out a political charge.

[api]

Not even close. There is no network layer firewalling. Private platforms have kicked off offensive and BS content mostly to protect their market value to the majority of users.

[opwieurposiu]

Private platforms censor to appease the advertisers, not the users.

[aaomidi]

Which is appeasing the users indirectly.

[rohan1024]

Until we have skynet online.

edit: I was talking about starlink. Assumed that Elon Musk named it skynet

[freeflight]

Skynet has actually been online, and killing people, for quite a while already [0].

[0] https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/02/the-n...