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.
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.
"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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.