[bduerst]

But his government is directly killing innocent people in Ukraine right now, which is worse.

Different times call for different measures of protest, albeit these two people still share the same goals against the same aggressor.

[margalabargala]

> his government

In the US, Europe, etc, one's government is actually approximately representative of a large portion of the populace.

In Russia, the government is autocratic and not at all representative of the populace, so comparisons like "their government is doing a worse thing than we're doing to them" kinda falls flat.

What it sounds like is happening here is that Namecheap feels like they want to do something, and they're doing a thing that they are able to do, and something causes damage in the general direction of the intended target. Probably there are non-zero Russian state news, propaganda, etc sites that will be affected by this.

But this is clearly not a war born out of popular desire of the populace, and the collateral damage from this is huge. The amount of harm this will cause random people who may be trying to flee Russia, or to Russian opposition organizations that might now be less able to organize internal protests, almost certainly outweighs any inconvenience caused to the Putin regime.

[bduerst]

Yes it's true the Russian regime is not a representative democracy, but it is an oligarchy.

International trade and economic sanctions hits the wealthy elite and is effective at influencing change. It's unfortunate that this inconveniences citizens but when the regime is unjustly declaring war and killing people it's one of the few moves left to make.

[margalabargala]

I'm not arguing against economic sanctions, those definitely hurt the responsible parties most. Kicking Russia out of SWIFT probably does 10x the damage to the oligarchs as to the citizenry.

Something like kicking every Russian person off of a web hosting platform does not hurt those in power most. Anyone with enough resources to matter in Russian politics will have enough resources to simply employ someone to move everything over and this will barely register as a blip. This probably impacts random citizens 10x more than the people in power.

[bduerst]

You are arguing against international trade and economic sanctions though, by saying it inconveniences Russian citizens while ignoring the Ukrainian citizens who are being killed.

Officially removing your business from Russia is a form of boycott, and it does hurt the oligarchs who own the businesses who use the registrar.