29 ms·

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.

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.

roody15 5y ago
Also vice versa. Although war propaganda is in full swing … there is a bit of truth on the Russian side about NATO encroachment since 1997
shabier 5y ago
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.
- MaxGanzII 5y ago
  > or ourselves from them Russian media is purely State controlled and is preaching justifications for the invasion of Ukraine. This is not a free speech situation.
  - shabier 5y ago
    Oh please, the same happened in the US after 9/11, and we all rolled with it. Cut the free speech nonsense, we're (as in big tech) not enforcing it either.
    - lolinder 5y ago
      These moral equivalencies have to stop. The US didn't declare anti-war protests to be illegal and arrest 7000+ protesters in the course of the first week of the war in Iraq. The US didn't shut down independent media outlets that were opposed to the war. The US didn't block (nascent) web platforms that hosted anti-war discussion. The US media is often a propaganda arm of the government. The Russian government tries to ensure their propaganda is all you see. There's a massive difference.
      - waffleiron 5y ago
        Plenty of anti Iraq war protesters got arrested Just one of many examples: https://www.chicagotribune.com/politics/chi-city-offers-62-million-to-settle-arrests-at-2003-war-protest-20120209-story.html?outputType=amp https://www.chicagotribune.com/politics/chi-city-offers-62-m...
        lolinder 5y ago
        I'm not condoning those arrests, but their scope is nothing like what we're seeing in Russia, and that news article is about the arrested being paid damages because the arrests were illegal. Even then, all involved were released the next day. The scope of the arrests in Russia is much wider (as a percentage of those protesting and in raw numbers), and they're legal.
        netmonk 5y ago
        ttybird2 5y ago
        "Can you explain why Snowden is refugee in Russia for having denouncing the crime of USA worldwide ?" Afaik, you are probably thinking of Assange (who is currently under arrest in the UK). Snowden is a refugee in Russia for exposing NSA's surveillance.
        waffleiron 5y ago
  - stickfigure 5y ago
    Give humanity a little more credit.
    - gjvc 5y ago
      experience shows that doing so is futile
    - megous 5y ago
      Here you have humanity (too): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f_pNIGoCybk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f_pNIGoCybk https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCk0Ktc21_lgVNiZRY9Py1Fg/videos?view=0&sort=dd&shelf_id=0 https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCk0Ktc21_lgVNiZRY9Py1Fg/vid... https://twitter.com/ilya_shepelin/status/1499298510394601474 https://twitter.com/ilya_shepelin/status/1499298510394601474 (I guess a result of the state media control)
  - wbsss4412 5y ago
    It isn’t ICANN’s job to control propaganda.
    - user-the-name 5y ago
MaxGanzII 5y ago
The Russian State is and has been for a long time pushing a profoundly anti-Western agenda. The Russian people are completely controlled. They have no way, even if they knew exactly what was going on and understood it for what it is, to rally, no one to lead them, no way to resist. The Russian people are not a mechanism by which the Russian leadership can be affected. > We can not allow Russia to run the narrative by cutting of the internet. I may be wrong, but I understood the request was to remove ".ru" and two other related top levels. It was not to cut them off from Internet access. I am in favour of both the removal of ".ru" and related domains, and also of cutting Russia off from the net, if such a thing were possible, which I think it is not.
- shabier 5y ago
  > The Russian State is and has been for a long time pushing a profoundly anti-Western agenda. We've been having our fair share of anti-Russia propaganda as well, we're not innocent of what we're accusing Russia of. > The Russian people are completely controlled. They have no way, even if they knew exactly what was going on and understood it for what it is, to rally, no one to lead them, no way to resist. What exactly do you think would happen to the west if we censored Russian "propaganda"? > I am in favour of both the removal of ".ru" and related domains ... And they'll move to another TLD just as easily as they were booted off the .ru or even worse; it moves outside the scope of the "accessible" web where their ideas are not challenged. Overall, a bad idea, IMO.
  - MaxGanzII 5y ago
    > We've been having our fair share of anti-Russia propaganda as well, we're not innocent of what we're accusing Russia of. No. These are not comparable. In the West, you have a range of views and there is no deliberate censorship of views by the State. In Russia, you get and only get what the State produces, and what they've been producing over the last several years has been crazy; Ukraine is not a country, and we have a holy mission to liberate them. > Overall, a bad idea, IMO. It is sometimes better to act than not to act, even if what you do is not perfect; it all adds pressure and expresses that you are serious about what you're doing.
2Gkashmiri 5y ago
look. i want to ask a simple question. "anti-western agenda" is fine and good but have you ever looked at that? is the american media not involved in anti-russia propaganda? or anti-iran propaganda? do you think their propaganda might just be reciprocal to what you people are doing? sure. pictures and videos of guantanamo bay are everywhere, so are the works leaked by wikileaks. they paint a similar picture of the american exceptionalism the way russians and the chinese do to their own people. remember instead of trying the culprits of that helicopter video leaked by wikileaks, the us government is shooting the messenger and not targeting the message itself. what i am saying is, every side of this mess has dirty laundry. there are no good or bad sides. you are taking one side because you live there or whatever. how is it free speech if "russia today" is banned by youtube or facebook or twitter in the US or EU but if russia blocks facebook or CNN in russia then its "attack of free speech?" you want your agenda, your propaganda be heard by your enemies but you dont want your people to know the enemies agenda. sure fine. you can do that but its not exceptionalism.
- MaxGanzII 5y ago
  > how is it free speech if "russia today" is banned by youtube or facebook or twitter in the US or EU but if russia blocks facebook or CNN in russia then its "attack of free speech?" Free speech does not include using speech to lie and defraud. The Russian State controls the Russian media and what you get is and only is propaganda. It is there purely to defaud and deceive. This is not about freedom of speech, it's about crime. If you meet a man lying through his teeth to sell you fake insurance, you do not protect his actions on the basis of freedom of speech.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - Bostonian 5y ago
    Free speech in the U.S. does include lying about politics. Republicans and Democrats are free to lie about the policies of the other party. You would not want to make adjudicating what political statements are lies a judicial matter. That is the job of the media and the voters.
paganel 5y ago
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.
- MrDresden 5y ago
  Potentially by removing the access to these products and services, there is a slight chance for the Russian population to react in such a way as to force change in their country. Isolating them from the internet would though probably backfire.
  - ivan90210 5y ago
    - hellorussianbot 5y ago
    - netmonk 5y ago
      with real reasons.
      - witrak 5y ago
        Would you name some of these? I mean related to the subject...
        djbusby 5y ago
        Loads of folk in the "west" are brainwashed too - like all the ones who insist Trump won election in USA as one example. That same group is now claiming this conflict never would have started because Putin was afraid of Trump.
chinathrow 5y ago
> to allow the government to push an anti-western agenda. To be honest, not much would change then as of today.
kubb 5y ago
bro, most russians don't even speak a second language. they use the russian internet for everything. nuanced takes from hacker news won't reach them
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
coffeeblack 5y ago
More importantly, it would have set a precedent that nobody could want.
- shabier 5y ago
  Oh yes, exactly that. This is a slippery slope.
  - multjoy 5y ago
    Slippery slope to where, exactly? Have you been watching the news at all?
    - arminiusreturns 5y ago
      Did you ever watch the news prior to the last ten years? At this very moment the US and UK are in multiple countries bombing and killing civilians. Should they be cut off also? I'm so flabbergasted people can't see past their nose regarding current events, it all reminds me very much of OIF/OEF propaganda levels. Be vigilant for real psyops (as opposed to the soft army stuff that hit frontpage recently)
      - Karsteski 5y ago
        It's interesting how the world rallied immediately to the aid of Ukraine in a big way, compared to the middle eastern countries that have been destroyed by the likes of the US and allies, or the South American countries that have been completely destabilized by the US government. Really makes you think...
        Supermancho 5y ago
        The difference really makes you think what? Ukraine is a (mostly christian) democratic country who's main exports are not drugs or oil. The leadership doesnt declare holy war on other countries. Also there's the focus on the history of the USSR and Ukraine in europe, alongside their efforts to join western alliances. Afganistan or Saudi Arabia or Iraq never tried to join the EU or NATO. Cultures that are alike tend to by sympathetic to each other. That's it. In regard to US vs Latin America - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latin_America%E2%80%93United_States_relations https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latin_America%E2%80%93United_S... Commercial interest and local defense. When Putin fueled separatist armies prior to the invasion, this was equivalent to the banana wars in Latin America, fueled by the US. The world stage generally ignores these kinds of regional 3rd party conflicts.
TrueDuality 5y ago
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...
- ithkuil 5y ago
  1. it could fuel retaliation by the russian government, perhaps lying that the cut done by the west is not asymmetric and it's actually the reason internet doesn't work for russians 2. isn't it useful that people on the west at least know what kind of propaganda people in russia consume?
  - RhodesianHunter 5y ago
    WRT #1 - Repeatedly not taking action out of fear of Russian retaliation is precisely what has gotten us to this point. Putin will step over the line until the west pushes back.
    - _-david-_ 5y ago
      Taking actions is what got us here. Many of the times when the West tries to push institutions east Russia retaliates. Look at the Georgia war and Crimea for example.
      - witrak 5y ago
bastardoperator 5y ago
I do. It's Russia's most powerful weapon where they already control the narrative and push an anti-western agenda. Without internet, the people of Russia will revolt. When communications got cut in Egypt in 2011, people took to the streets which resulted in democracy and forming an entirely new government all within days. China isn't hiding anything. They try, but it's a fool's errand. The more they try the more people want to know about it. No one in China that lived during that atrocity is unaware.
- lupire 5y ago
  The new generation in China is extremely unaware.
  - bastardoperator 5y ago
    I don't think so. I run a popular gaming server and people from China connect daily. It's a regular topic and most folks playing are young. It's not that they're unaware, it's just history for them. It's like saying Americans are unaware that the US military was the first and only nation to use nuclear weapons. We don't like it, but we're not unaware.
    - newuser94303 5y ago
      Most Americans are told in school that it was necessary. Several states are trying to remove slavery from history classes. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/20/us/texas-history-1836-project.html https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/20/us/texas-history-1836-pro... - Texas, Idaho, etc
      - witrak 5y ago
        Well, interpretation or background may be biased. But nobody tries to hide pure facts...
      - bastardoperator 5y ago
        Depends on where you live and who your teachers are. Texas textbooks promote revisionist history where California textbooks put more effort into inclusion and critical thinking. Most states piggy on the CA or TX version, it depends on who makes the purchasing decisions at the state level but Americans based on location are typically subjected to one or the other.
asats 5y ago
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/ 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.
lenkite 5y ago
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.
dangerface 5y ago
> It will isolate them enough to allow the government to push an anti-western agenda. They are already doing this, Russian media is going full propaganda everything they say is a blatant lie simply to reduce the signal to noise. The more important aspect is their cyber attacks on Ukraine that prevent civilians and militias from organising to escape the violence or repel it. Russia's state sponsored cyber attacks show it has no interest in contributing to a healthy internet, they should be banned.
kazinator 5y ago
I don't think cutting off Russia from the Internet is a good idea simply because not everyone inside Russia who uses that connection is necessarily a Bad Guy. Do you want to be cutting off Russia's anti-war protesters from the world?
- londons_explore 5y ago
  Yet we cut off the athletes from the paralympics. Wouldn't the same argument apply to them?
  - vharuck 5y ago
    The International Paralympic Committee at first did not ban Russian or Belarusian athletes[0], but required them to enter without any national symbols. Which was how Russian athletes completed in the Winter Olympics. After enough threats of protests and boycotts that would have interfered with the games, it was decided to keep those country's athletes out. Honestly, I'm not surprised. Though they were going to march under a neutral flag, they'd have still been emissaries of their governments. That's what the Olympics and Paralympics are for. Plus, the IPC's decision was probably easier because of repeated incidents of Russian athletes doping, which is why they were already under a neutral flag. [0] https://abcnews.go.com/Sports/wireStory/russian-athletes-paralympics-stunning-face-83222611 https://abcnews.go.com/Sports/wireStory/russian-athletes-par...
nicce 5y ago
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-global-internet-tests-rbc-daily-2021-07-22/ https://www.reuters.com/technology/russia-disconnected-globa...
- grishka 5y ago
  Still way too much depends on overseas infrastructure. I remember how they blocked some parts of AWS in an effort to block Telegram. Almost everything broke. Even services that were supposed to be fully local.
atlantas 5y ago
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.
- megous 5y ago
  > Realize that our next Iraq or Vietnam this new standard could be applied to us or any other country. Is that a bad thing?
  - mywittyname 5y ago
    For you and me? Yes. For the wealthy and powerful who make the decisions? No.
    - lazide 5y ago
      If it is for you and me? If yes, then it is more likely to matter to the wealthy and powerful whose power base depends to some extent on us. Assuming we haven’t all been convinced via propaganda that this is all a conspiracy to weaken us and we need to band together under $glorious_leader anyway.
- arcticbull 5y ago
  > Plus think about the precedent being set here. Punishing civilians for the actions of its government is absolutely insane and will backfire badly. I disagree. This is war - it's not meant to be comfortable - and a government does represent the people. Putin's approval rating over the years has been really high, in the mid-high 70s [1]. The only way this ends with minimal bloodshed is if the populace exerts sufficient pressure against leadership. That means protests, that means civil disobedience. If the populace doesn't feel the impact of the war, then there's no pressure for the administration to end it. Think of it more like less-lethal weapons. Yah you don't want to get hit by a rubber bullet but you certainly don't want to get hit by a real bullet. If things escalate then the people may get hit by real bullets metaphorically and literally. [edit] > Punishing civilians for the actions of its government is absolutely insane and will backfire badly. This is an interesting argument, especially for a representative government. "You can't blame me for what the people I pick do!" I mean, yes? I can? Even in countries without, governments can be overturned internally. [1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/896181/putin-approval-rating-russia/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/896181/putin-approval-ra...
cabalamat 5y ago
> Yes they will push their own propaganda to the west but we can deal with that. Agreed. Keeping the net open helps the West win this war. Russians turn to e.g. the BBC, because they know its more reliable than their own media.
romwell 5y ago
The title is misleading. The request wasn't to cut off Russia from the net. It was to let .ru domains expire, and not issue SSL certificates for them. It would only affect .ru and .рф websites. Russians would still be able to get their news from bbc.com — but maybe not ria.ru We all would have been better off. There's currently little-to-nothing of value on .ru websites.
- ipaddr 5y ago
  Yandex.ru has a lot value for western internet user. You have three big search engines: google, bing and yandex (4 if you count baidu).
neltnerb 5y ago
I agree, cutting off communication networks that are hard to censor is not a smart strategy. During the cold war and WWII the ability to reach people with AM radio broadcasts from foreign news sources was critical to countering at least some propaganda.
tablespoon 5y ago
> 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. Exactly. IIRC, Russia is actually taking steps to build a great firewall to do that deliberately. They're just not there yet. But once they have the technology to connect to the internet on Putin's terms, cutting them off will make more sense. Maybe not enough sense to actually do, but the option should be re-evaluated.
- miohtama 5y ago
  Correct. If someone is going to disconnect Russia from Internet it is going to be Russian themselves, to limit the free flow of information that might be conflicting with the official truth. But like with the Chinese firewall, information find its way. Unless Russia wants to set itself back to 70s, they still need to access Github, Cloudflare, Amazon Cloudfront, etc. For the Russian IT business to work. Software development and Internet were built on scientific principles, criticism, criticial thinking. This requires free flow of information. You cannot have one without the other, or you are going to end up with very inferior and inefficient software ecosystem.
  - tablespoon 5y ago
    > But like with the Chinese firewall, information find its way. Unless Russia wants to set itself back to 70s, they still need to access Github, Cloudflare, Amazon Cloudfront, etc. For the Russian IT business to work. Don't be so optimistic. It isn't the 90s anymore. "Information [will] find its way [through]," but probably not in ways that can change anything. > Software development and Internet were built on scientific principles, criticism, criticial thinking. This requires free flow of information. You cannot have one without the other, or you are going to end up with very inferior and inefficient software ecosystem. It's doubtful if that's true, but even if it is, the response of dictators everywhere is: "so?" A strong "software ecosystem" might be a top priority for you, but they care more about other things.
rexpop 5y ago
Simply "seeing" the "misery" of war is easier eaid than done, although you're right that it's done more deliberately outside the reach of the warring parties. A primer on this subject is Sontag's "Regarding the Pain of Others". https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/52373.Regarding_the_Pain_of_Others https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/52373.Regarding_the_Pain...
m00x 5y ago
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 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/afghan https://watson.brown.edu/costsofwar/costs/human/civilians/af...
- vkou 5y ago
  Eventually, it pushed approval from a hair above 50% to a hair below 50%, and contributed some to sinking the presidential bid of John 'Hundred Years of War' McCain. [1] Perhaps if an incredibly comprehensive package of sanctions could have been part of the package, it would have changed more minds faster. [1] He's rehabilitated his political image, somewhat, since then, but man, oh man, that was quite the foreign policy plan.
- 7952 5y ago
  I think it had an effect on public mood in Vietnam, which is why press coverage was restricted in later wars. Who knows how it could have played out in a modern connected world.
- minimal-o 5y ago
  relevant regarding Iraq: http://www.csun.edu/~vcmth00m/iraqkuwait.html http://www.csun.edu/~vcmth00m/iraqkuwait.html
UltraViolence 5y ago
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
slaymaker1907 5y ago
Plus I'm sure the elites in Russia will find ways to access the public internet. It would depend on how the cutoff were implemented, but unscrupulous VPNs in nearby countries might work.
908B64B197 5y ago
> 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. Completely agree. I think popular website owners should go even further and target content specifically to Russian IP informing them of the causalities in Ukraine and protests going around in Russia.
qualudeheart 5y ago
It’s one of the best short term sanctions. In the long run it will only drive Russia closer to China and make their anti-western, anti-Nato alliance stronger.
jl6 5y ago
Another potential unintended consequence: Russians come to the conclusion that Putin has failed to protect them from the sanctions, so they oust him in favor of someone even more hardline.
gtvwill 5y ago
Weak response. Its this kind of weak response that got us to the point of russia invading a peaceful neighbor. They know the response would be weak. IMHO, shut off their internet, send their economy and comms back to the effin dark ages. Block all flight over Russian air space (we can legit shoot planes down from well outside the country). See if putin survives 6 months then. Russians like comfort. Russians like a modern life. Strip it from them for their actions. They will fight to get it back on their own soil. Until them. F russia. F putin. F the russian people for letting this happen. They are complacent. They are responsible. The behavior you walk past is the standard you set.
otherme123 5y ago
Exactly. When North Korea and China put so much effort to cut their citizens from the outside information, one must ask how damaging would be that for Putin. To me it sounds like a double win for him: he can play victim, while west does exactly what he needs to push the internal propaganda.
pax 5y ago
What about, instead of plainly denying service, the pages would be spoofed, with slight alterations – showing some bits of reality / counter propaganda? might that have any merit? not to everybody at once, ideally to selected audiences, so it would be spotted & counteracted latter than sooner.

roody15 5y ago

Also vice versa. Although war propaganda is in full swing … there is a bit of truth on the Russian side about NATO encroachment since 1997

shabier 5y ago

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.

MaxGanzII 5y ago
> or ourselves from them Russian media is purely State controlled and is preaching justifications for the invasion of Ukraine. This is not a free speech situation.
- shabier 5y ago
  Oh please, the same happened in the US after 9/11, and we all rolled with it. Cut the free speech nonsense, we're (as in big tech) not enforcing it either.
  - lolinder 5y ago
    These moral equivalencies have to stop. The US didn't declare anti-war protests to be illegal and arrest 7000+ protesters in the course of the first week of the war in Iraq. The US didn't shut down independent media outlets that were opposed to the war. The US didn't block (nascent) web platforms that hosted anti-war discussion. The US media is often a propaganda arm of the government. The Russian government tries to ensure their propaganda is all you see. There's a massive difference.
    - waffleiron 5y ago
      Plenty of anti Iraq war protesters got arrested Just one of many examples: https://www.chicagotribune.com/politics/chi-city-offers-62-million-to-settle-arrests-at-2003-war-protest-20120209-story.html?outputType=amp https://www.chicagotribune.com/politics/chi-city-offers-62-m...
      - lolinder 5y ago
        I'm not condoning those arrests, but their scope is nothing like what we're seeing in Russia, and that news article is about the arrested being paid damages because the arrests were illegal. Even then, all involved were released the next day. The scope of the arrests in Russia is much wider (as a percentage of those protesting and in raw numbers), and they're legal.
        netmonk 5y ago
        ttybird2 5y ago
        "Can you explain why Snowden is refugee in Russia for having denouncing the crime of USA worldwide ?" Afaik, you are probably thinking of Assange (who is currently under arrest in the UK). Snowden is a refugee in Russia for exposing NSA's surveillance.
        waffleiron 5y ago
- stickfigure 5y ago
  Give humanity a little more credit.
  - gjvc 5y ago
    experience shows that doing so is futile
  - megous 5y ago
    Here you have humanity (too): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f_pNIGoCybk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f_pNIGoCybk https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCk0Ktc21_lgVNiZRY9Py1Fg/videos?view=0&sort=dd&shelf_id=0 https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCk0Ktc21_lgVNiZRY9Py1Fg/vid... https://twitter.com/ilya_shepelin/status/1499298510394601474 https://twitter.com/ilya_shepelin/status/1499298510394601474 (I guess a result of the state media control)
- wbsss4412 5y ago
  It isn’t ICANN’s job to control propaganda.
  - user-the-name 5y ago

MaxGanzII 5y ago

The Russian State is and has been for a long time pushing a profoundly anti-Western agenda. The Russian people are completely controlled. They have no way, even if they knew exactly what was going on and understood it for what it is, to rally, no one to lead them, no way to resist. The Russian people are not a mechanism by which the Russian leadership can be affected. > We can not allow Russia to run the narrative by cutting of the internet. I may be wrong, but I understood the request was to remove ".ru" and two other related top levels. It was not to cut them off from Internet access. I am in favour of both the removal of ".ru" and related domains, and also of cutting Russia off from the net, if such a thing were possible, which I think it is not.

shabier 5y ago
> The Russian State is and has been for a long time pushing a profoundly anti-Western agenda. We've been having our fair share of anti-Russia propaganda as well, we're not innocent of what we're accusing Russia of. > The Russian people are completely controlled. They have no way, even if they knew exactly what was going on and understood it for what it is, to rally, no one to lead them, no way to resist. What exactly do you think would happen to the west if we censored Russian "propaganda"? > I am in favour of both the removal of ".ru" and related domains ... And they'll move to another TLD just as easily as they were booted off the .ru or even worse; it moves outside the scope of the "accessible" web where their ideas are not challenged. Overall, a bad idea, IMO.
- MaxGanzII 5y ago
  > We've been having our fair share of anti-Russia propaganda as well, we're not innocent of what we're accusing Russia of. No. These are not comparable. In the West, you have a range of views and there is no deliberate censorship of views by the State. In Russia, you get and only get what the State produces, and what they've been producing over the last several years has been crazy; Ukraine is not a country, and we have a holy mission to liberate them. > Overall, a bad idea, IMO. It is sometimes better to act than not to act, even if what you do is not perfect; it all adds pressure and expresses that you are serious about what you're doing.

2Gkashmiri 5y ago

look. i want to ask a simple question. "anti-western agenda" is fine and good but have you ever looked at that? is the american media not involved in anti-russia propaganda? or anti-iran propaganda? do you think their propaganda might just be reciprocal to what you people are doing? sure. pictures and videos of guantanamo bay are everywhere, so are the works leaked by wikileaks. they paint a similar picture of the american exceptionalism the way russians and the chinese do to their own people. remember instead of trying the culprits of that helicopter video leaked by wikileaks, the us government is shooting the messenger and not targeting the message itself. what i am saying is, every side of this mess has dirty laundry. there are no good or bad sides. you are taking one side because you live there or whatever. how is it free speech if "russia today" is banned by youtube or facebook or twitter in the US or EU but if russia blocks facebook or CNN in russia then its "attack of free speech?" you want your agenda, your propaganda be heard by your enemies but you dont want your people to know the enemies agenda. sure fine. you can do that but its not exceptionalism.

MaxGanzII 5y ago
> how is it free speech if "russia today" is banned by youtube or facebook or twitter in the US or EU but if russia blocks facebook or CNN in russia then its "attack of free speech?" Free speech does not include using speech to lie and defraud. The Russian State controls the Russian media and what you get is and only is propaganda. It is there purely to defaud and deceive. This is not about freedom of speech, it's about crime. If you meet a man lying through his teeth to sell you fake insurance, you do not protect his actions on the basis of freedom of speech.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- Bostonian 5y ago
  Free speech in the U.S. does include lying about politics. Republicans and Democrats are free to lie about the policies of the other party. You would not want to make adjudicating what political statements are lies a judicial matter. That is the job of the media and the voters.

paganel 5y ago

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.

MrDresden 5y ago
Potentially by removing the access to these products and services, there is a slight chance for the Russian population to react in such a way as to force change in their country. Isolating them from the internet would though probably backfire.
- ivan90210 5y ago
  - hellorussianbot 5y ago
  - netmonk 5y ago
    with real reasons.
    - witrak 5y ago
      Would you name some of these? I mean related to the subject...
      - djbusby 5y ago
        Loads of folk in the "west" are brainwashed too - like all the ones who insist Trump won election in USA as one example. That same group is now claiming this conflict never would have started because Putin was afraid of Trump.

chinathrow 5y ago

> to allow the government to push an anti-western agenda. To be honest, not much would change then as of today.

kubb 5y ago

bro, most russians don't even speak a second language. they use the russian internet for everything. nuanced takes from hacker news won't reach them

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

coffeeblack 5y ago

More importantly, it would have set a precedent that nobody could want.

shabier 5y ago
Oh yes, exactly that. This is a slippery slope.
- multjoy 5y ago
  Slippery slope to where, exactly? Have you been watching the news at all?
  - arminiusreturns 5y ago
    Did you ever watch the news prior to the last ten years? At this very moment the US and UK are in multiple countries bombing and killing civilians. Should they be cut off also? I'm so flabbergasted people can't see past their nose regarding current events, it all reminds me very much of OIF/OEF propaganda levels. Be vigilant for real psyops (as opposed to the soft army stuff that hit frontpage recently)
    - Karsteski 5y ago
      It's interesting how the world rallied immediately to the aid of Ukraine in a big way, compared to the middle eastern countries that have been destroyed by the likes of the US and allies, or the South American countries that have been completely destabilized by the US government. Really makes you think...
      - Supermancho 5y ago
        The difference really makes you think what? Ukraine is a (mostly christian) democratic country who's main exports are not drugs or oil. The leadership doesnt declare holy war on other countries. Also there's the focus on the history of the USSR and Ukraine in europe, alongside their efforts to join western alliances. Afganistan or Saudi Arabia or Iraq never tried to join the EU or NATO. Cultures that are alike tend to by sympathetic to each other. That's it. In regard to US vs Latin America - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latin_America%E2%80%93United_States_relations https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latin_America%E2%80%93United_S... Commercial interest and local defense. When Putin fueled separatist armies prior to the invasion, this was equivalent to the banana wars in Latin America, fueled by the US. The world stage generally ignores these kinds of regional 3rd party conflicts.

TrueDuality 5y ago

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...

ithkuil 5y ago
1. it could fuel retaliation by the russian government, perhaps lying that the cut done by the west is not asymmetric and it's actually the reason internet doesn't work for russians 2. isn't it useful that people on the west at least know what kind of propaganda people in russia consume?
- RhodesianHunter 5y ago
  WRT #1 - Repeatedly not taking action out of fear of Russian retaliation is precisely what has gotten us to this point. Putin will step over the line until the west pushes back.
  - _-david-_ 5y ago
    Taking actions is what got us here. Many of the times when the West tries to push institutions east Russia retaliates. Look at the Georgia war and Crimea for example.
    - witrak 5y ago

bastardoperator 5y ago

I do. It's Russia's most powerful weapon where they already control the narrative and push an anti-western agenda. Without internet, the people of Russia will revolt. When communications got cut in Egypt in 2011, people took to the streets which resulted in democracy and forming an entirely new government all within days. China isn't hiding anything. They try, but it's a fool's errand. The more they try the more people want to know about it. No one in China that lived during that atrocity is unaware.

lupire 5y ago
The new generation in China is extremely unaware.
- bastardoperator 5y ago
  I don't think so. I run a popular gaming server and people from China connect daily. It's a regular topic and most folks playing are young. It's not that they're unaware, it's just history for them. It's like saying Americans are unaware that the US military was the first and only nation to use nuclear weapons. We don't like it, but we're not unaware.
  - newuser94303 5y ago
    Most Americans are told in school that it was necessary. Several states are trying to remove slavery from history classes. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/20/us/texas-history-1836-project.html https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/20/us/texas-history-1836-pro... - Texas, Idaho, etc
    - witrak 5y ago
      Well, interpretation or background may be biased. But nobody tries to hide pure facts...
    - bastardoperator 5y ago
      Depends on where you live and who your teachers are. Texas textbooks promote revisionist history where California textbooks put more effort into inclusion and critical thinking. Most states piggy on the CA or TX version, it depends on who makes the purchasing decisions at the state level but Americans based on location are typically subjected to one or the other.

asats 5y ago

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/ 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.

lenkite 5y ago

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.

dangerface 5y ago

> It will isolate them enough to allow the government to push an anti-western agenda. They are already doing this, Russian media is going full propaganda everything they say is a blatant lie simply to reduce the signal to noise. The more important aspect is their cyber attacks on Ukraine that prevent civilians and militias from organising to escape the violence or repel it. Russia's state sponsored cyber attacks show it has no interest in contributing to a healthy internet, they should be banned.

kazinator 5y ago

I don't think cutting off Russia from the Internet is a good idea simply because not everyone inside Russia who uses that connection is necessarily a Bad Guy. Do you want to be cutting off Russia's anti-war protesters from the world?

londons_explore 5y ago
Yet we cut off the athletes from the paralympics. Wouldn't the same argument apply to them?
- vharuck 5y ago
  The International Paralympic Committee at first did not ban Russian or Belarusian athletes[0], but required them to enter without any national symbols. Which was how Russian athletes completed in the Winter Olympics. After enough threats of protests and boycotts that would have interfered with the games, it was decided to keep those country's athletes out. Honestly, I'm not surprised. Though they were going to march under a neutral flag, they'd have still been emissaries of their governments. That's what the Olympics and Paralympics are for. Plus, the IPC's decision was probably easier because of repeated incidents of Russian athletes doping, which is why they were already under a neutral flag. [0] https://abcnews.go.com/Sports/wireStory/russian-athletes-paralympics-stunning-face-83222611 https://abcnews.go.com/Sports/wireStory/russian-athletes-par...

nicce 5y ago

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-global-internet-tests-rbc-daily-2021-07-22/ https://www.reuters.com/technology/russia-disconnected-globa...

grishka 5y ago
Still way too much depends on overseas infrastructure. I remember how they blocked some parts of AWS in an effort to block Telegram. Almost everything broke. Even services that were supposed to be fully local.

atlantas 5y ago

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.

megous 5y ago
> Realize that our next Iraq or Vietnam this new standard could be applied to us or any other country. Is that a bad thing?
- mywittyname 5y ago
  For you and me? Yes. For the wealthy and powerful who make the decisions? No.
  - lazide 5y ago
    If it is for you and me? If yes, then it is more likely to matter to the wealthy and powerful whose power base depends to some extent on us. Assuming we haven’t all been convinced via propaganda that this is all a conspiracy to weaken us and we need to band together under $glorious_leader anyway.
arcticbull 5y ago
> Plus think about the precedent being set here. Punishing civilians for the actions of its government is absolutely insane and will backfire badly. I disagree. This is war - it's not meant to be comfortable - and a government does represent the people. Putin's approval rating over the years has been really high, in the mid-high 70s [1]. The only way this ends with minimal bloodshed is if the populace exerts sufficient pressure against leadership. That means protests, that means civil disobedience. If the populace doesn't feel the impact of the war, then there's no pressure for the administration to end it. Think of it more like less-lethal weapons. Yah you don't want to get hit by a rubber bullet but you certainly don't want to get hit by a real bullet. If things escalate then the people may get hit by real bullets metaphorically and literally. [edit] > Punishing civilians for the actions of its government is absolutely insane and will backfire badly. This is an interesting argument, especially for a representative government. "You can't blame me for what the people I pick do!" I mean, yes? I can? Even in countries without, governments can be overturned internally. [1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/896181/putin-approval-rating-russia/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/896181/putin-approval-ra...

cabalamat 5y ago

> Yes they will push their own propaganda to the west but we can deal with that. Agreed. Keeping the net open helps the West win this war. Russians turn to e.g. the BBC, because they know its more reliable than their own media.

romwell 5y ago

The title is misleading. The request wasn't to cut off Russia from the net. It was to let .ru domains expire, and not issue SSL certificates for them. It would only affect .ru and .рф websites. Russians would still be able to get their news from bbc.com — but maybe not ria.ru We all would have been better off. There's currently little-to-nothing of value on .ru websites.

ipaddr 5y ago
Yandex.ru has a lot value for western internet user. You have three big search engines: google, bing and yandex (4 if you count baidu).

neltnerb 5y ago

I agree, cutting off communication networks that are hard to censor is not a smart strategy. During the cold war and WWII the ability to reach people with AM radio broadcasts from foreign news sources was critical to countering at least some propaganda.

tablespoon 5y ago

> 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. Exactly. IIRC, Russia is actually taking steps to build a great firewall to do that deliberately. They're just not there yet. But once they have the technology to connect to the internet on Putin's terms, cutting them off will make more sense. Maybe not enough sense to actually do, but the option should be re-evaluated.

miohtama 5y ago
Correct. If someone is going to disconnect Russia from Internet it is going to be Russian themselves, to limit the free flow of information that might be conflicting with the official truth. But like with the Chinese firewall, information find its way. Unless Russia wants to set itself back to 70s, they still need to access Github, Cloudflare, Amazon Cloudfront, etc. For the Russian IT business to work. Software development and Internet were built on scientific principles, criticism, criticial thinking. This requires free flow of information. You cannot have one without the other, or you are going to end up with very inferior and inefficient software ecosystem.
- tablespoon 5y ago
  > But like with the Chinese firewall, information find its way. Unless Russia wants to set itself back to 70s, they still need to access Github, Cloudflare, Amazon Cloudfront, etc. For the Russian IT business to work. Don't be so optimistic. It isn't the 90s anymore. "Information [will] find its way [through]," but probably not in ways that can change anything. > Software development and Internet were built on scientific principles, criticism, criticial thinking. This requires free flow of information. You cannot have one without the other, or you are going to end up with very inferior and inefficient software ecosystem. It's doubtful if that's true, but even if it is, the response of dictators everywhere is: "so?" A strong "software ecosystem" might be a top priority for you, but they care more about other things.

rexpop 5y ago

Simply "seeing" the "misery" of war is easier eaid than done, although you're right that it's done more deliberately outside the reach of the warring parties. A primer on this subject is Sontag's "Regarding the Pain of Others". https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/52373.Regarding_the_Pain_of_Others https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/52373.Regarding_the_Pain...

m00x 5y ago

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 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/afghan https://watson.brown.edu/costsofwar/costs/human/civilians/af...

vkou 5y ago
Eventually, it pushed approval from a hair above 50% to a hair below 50%, and contributed some to sinking the presidential bid of John 'Hundred Years of War' McCain. [1] Perhaps if an incredibly comprehensive package of sanctions could have been part of the package, it would have changed more minds faster. [1] He's rehabilitated his political image, somewhat, since then, but man, oh man, that was quite the foreign policy plan.
7952 5y ago
I think it had an effect on public mood in Vietnam, which is why press coverage was restricted in later wars. Who knows how it could have played out in a modern connected world.
minimal-o 5y ago
relevant regarding Iraq: http://www.csun.edu/~vcmth00m/iraqkuwait.html http://www.csun.edu/~vcmth00m/iraqkuwait.html

UltraViolence 5y ago

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

slaymaker1907 5y ago

Plus I'm sure the elites in Russia will find ways to access the public internet. It would depend on how the cutoff were implemented, but unscrupulous VPNs in nearby countries might work.

908B64B197 5y ago

> 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. Completely agree. I think popular website owners should go even further and target content specifically to Russian IP informing them of the causalities in Ukraine and protests going around in Russia.

qualudeheart 5y ago

It’s one of the best short term sanctions. In the long run it will only drive Russia closer to China and make their anti-western, anti-Nato alliance stronger.

jl6 5y ago

Another potential unintended consequence: Russians come to the conclusion that Putin has failed to protect them from the sanctions, so they oust him in favor of someone even more hardline.

gtvwill 5y ago

Weak response. Its this kind of weak response that got us to the point of russia invading a peaceful neighbor. They know the response would be weak. IMHO, shut off their internet, send their economy and comms back to the effin dark ages. Block all flight over Russian air space (we can legit shoot planes down from well outside the country). See if putin survives 6 months then. Russians like comfort. Russians like a modern life. Strip it from them for their actions. They will fight to get it back on their own soil. Until them. F russia. F putin. F the russian people for letting this happen. They are complacent. They are responsible. The behavior you walk past is the standard you set.

otherme123 5y ago

Exactly. When North Korea and China put so much effort to cut their citizens from the outside information, one must ask how damaging would be that for Putin. To me it sounds like a double win for him: he can play victim, while west does exactly what he needs to push the internal propaganda.

pax 5y ago

What about, instead of plainly denying service, the pages would be spoofed, with slight alterations – showing some bits of reality / counter propaganda? might that have any merit? not to everybody at once, ideally to selected audiences, so it would be spotted & counteracted latter than sooner.