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Kind of wish the comments here would focus more on the need to fight the Russian propaganda. The point on how isolating the Russians helps the propaganda seems

by jolmg 5y ago

Kind of wish the comments here would focus more on the need to fight the Russian propaganda. The point on how isolating the Russians helps the propaganda seems like the most important take-away. Instead comments seem to focus on how Russians deserve punishment, but how productive is this type of punishment? I would think it's an important goal to turn the Russians against Putin.

ardit33 5y ago
'Isolating Russia' -- Didn't they just ban FB and Twitter there? Aren't they cutting off their own internet as well? How is this the west doing? The west is not isolating them, just they are self isolating. All independent media had to shut down there.
- jolmg 5y ago
  > The west is not isolating them, just they are self isolating. Western services are also cutting them off. I get the sense that's helping Putin. An example: > Namecheap: Russia Service Termination https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30504812 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30504812 Maybe a DNS service is not the best example, but I feel like it's not the only service that I've seen do this. EDIT: Better example: > Internet backbone provider shuts off service in Russia https://www.theverge.com/2022/3/5/22962822/internet-backbone-provider-cogent-shuts-off-service-russia https://www.theverge.com/2022/3/5/22962822/internet-backbone...
  - ardit33 5y ago
    And your point is? They can use their own services, nobody wants to prevent that. But guess what? Putin doesn't like its citizen's to be able to read outside sources and is shutting things outside access himself. Even BBC has to restart using AM radio for its russian services (not done since the Cold War). Stop 'victim playing' and blaming the west, when you should be blaming your leader for the massive censorship going on in Russia right now.
    - jolmg 5y ago
      > Stop 'victim playing' and blaming the west, when you should be blaming your leader for the massive censorship going on in Russia right now. TF? I'm not Russian. I put a better example.
    - KBme 5y ago
    - nix23 5y ago
      Look i get it, you are angry but stop telling people that their leader is someone and accuse them of "victim playing", was Trump your leader? Has anyone told you that you are playing victim? Was Bush Jr your leader the guy who attacked two Country's and lied about Chemical weapons in Iraq..where did i heard something like that lately? https://news.sky.com/story/ukraine-war-moscows-claims-of-biological-weapons-programme-in-war-hit-country-are-absurd-propaganda-says-us-12561787 https://news.sky.com/story/ukraine-war-moscows-claims-of-bio...
    - orbital-decay 5y ago
      It seems nobody here actually read the OP, jumping straight to the flamewar in comments. Lumen and Cogent already stopped peering with Russian ISPs. It's not Russian government, and they are doing the dirty work for the Russian government. This is not about punishment or providing services, this is about peering and basic connectivity at the backbone level. It can break the Internet as the common medium, and not just for Russia. This sets the precedent that undermines decades of development and can make the biggest contribution to peace in the history of humanity fall apart into different bubbles.
      - nix23 5y ago
        >can make the biggest contribution to peace in the history of humanity fall apart into different bubbles. Very powerful message and on point, it's no wonder every dictator shuts the net down when things start to turn/burn internally.
  - fennecfoxen 5y ago
    The Internet — both the network backbone and the many websites that operate on the Internet — is mostly operated for profit, and running it isn't free. Collecting payment from Russian sources right now is dodgy; payment providers are unlikely to help, banks are sanctioned, and the risk of not getting paid is high. Moscow currency exchanges have been shut down, and we see the government decree that bonds denominated in foreign currencies will be paid in rubles. Certain foreign entities are seeing their property and businesses in Russia nationalized (as a kind of retaliation for ceasing business). This environment of elevated risk is ample reason for any international business to avoid business with Russian nationals, other Russian entities, and anything to do with Russia, generally, at this time. It is unfortunate that Russian citizens may see less of the outside world as a consequence of these high level sanctions and of this politically risky situation. It is not the responsibility of these operators to remedy that.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    - dunkelheit 5y ago
      If history is any guide, businesses are totally ok with dodgy payment methods (Russia paid Pepsi with warships once) and dealing with governments that are not that respectful towards private property as long as profit is expected. The main risks now are reputational. Cynically, I would put it that way - withdrawing from Russia has gone viral, all the cool kids are doing it.
- EugeneOZ 5y ago
  There are examples in the article.
vernie 5y ago
Russia is isolating the Russians. Roskomnadzor is throttling and blocking the Russian people's access to the wider internet, not Western providers.
- jolmg 5y ago
  > not Western providers An example: > Namecheap: Russia Service Termination https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30504812 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30504812 EDIT: Better example: > Internet backbone provider shuts off service in Russia https://www.theverge.com/2022/3/5/22962822/internet-backbone https://www.theverge.com/2022/3/5/22962822/internet-backbone...
  - vernie 5y ago
    I think the impact of this action compared to state internet censorship is insignificant.
    - jolmg 5y ago
      Right. I put a better example.
  - ptero 5y ago
    OK, Western providers do this, too. But I think the much bigger problem is that all independent media, everything except reliably pro-Kremlin sources, is being very aggressively shut down from the inside. And that includes access to outside channels and programs. While I generally agree that the West should not be shutting down the information pipes, in this environment the additional harm of such actions may be minimal.
  - sndean 5y ago
    I'm not sure Namecheap should be used as an example of a Western provider. While I think they're technically based in the US, according to their CEO they have many employees in one of the Ukrainian cities currently being bombed: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30506813 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30506813
itronitron 5y ago
Russians have been living with Putin in charge for the last twenty years. I doubt that anyone immune to the propaganda will suddenly start to believe it, and I also doubt that people that believe the propaganda could have their minds suddenly changed.
- notahacker 5y ago
  Or put more subtly, the sort of Russian that generally believes Russian media isn't particularly likely to have bought a VPN to access alternative perspectives if only their Visa/Mastercard still worked. The sort of Russian that would have done that is fairly unlikely to believe that the war must be going well because it's even harder for them to access Facebook.
  - jolmg 5y ago
    Even if that's the case, it's still not helping.
    - brimble 5y ago
      Either access to the global Internet is not, in fact, economically valuable, or yes, it absolutely would help (in the sense of harming the Russian economy, that is)
      - jolmg 5y ago
        I'm not against harming their economy, but am against harming their access to information. I don't think doing the former necessitates doing the latter. In the cases where they overlap, I think the harm to the economy is negligible.
        brimble 5y ago
        If the Russian government thought that the parts of the Internet they still allow were any threat, in excess of the economic or strategic benefit it provides, they'd have already cut it off. I think the viability of any kind of Internet-based propaganda war are badly over-estimated by its proponents, especially when the other side gets to filter out entire sites that are inconvenient. It works much better against a foe that's far more open (so, us).
gameswithgo 5y ago
Many of us believe that Internet or not will have basically no impact on this question of turning Russians against Putin. I have lived through the entire life of the Internet and seen only the exact opposite things happened that we all expected and hoped would happen with free and open access to information. Conspiracy theories thrived rather than got rebutted, political discourse worsened, it did not improve. The power of large corporations increased, power was not democratized. Perhaps without Internet young people will be bored and when young men are idle they tend to turn to the kind of violent uprising Russia probably needs.
- jolmg 5y ago
  > Perhaps without Internet young people will be bored and when young men are idle they tend to turn to the kind of violent uprising Russia probably needs. That seems way too improbable.
nix23 5y ago
Absolutely, what is the first thing a Dictator would do?...right shutdown the internet, but what if the Western "Community" shuts it down? An internet shutdown by someone else is the wet dream of the Government, Russnet (the russian Intranet) will still work and probably connected in the future to Xinet (name is TM by me, and ping is blocked on it). Two perfect Intranets, and probably also swift will get changed in the future with china as the exchange knot to russia and swift. That's a terrible decision for every Russian who wants to have a chance to find different information's.
- chupasaurus 5y ago
  In Russia the name Cheburnet was born from a speech of parliament's member who initiated the laws for the autonomous mode for ISPs, he threw something along the line "we'd basically get our own network, we could name it Cheburashka, for example".
trhway 5y ago
>The point on how isolating the Russians helps the propaganda seems like the most important take-away. Russians have had all the ability to watch the videos of Ukraine destruction and to get all the other true information about the war. They wouldn't. All together with Putin they have for 20 years been resurrecting the myth of "Great Russia", which in its current form is pretty much nazism (or like Ukrainians and Baltic countries usually call it "russism" ['rashizm']- short for "Russian Fascism"). Even directly facing the truth Russians refuse to believe it and dismiss it as fakes, propaganda, etc. They like to think of themselves as a "Big Brother liberating the smaller one". That is kind of mental blindness which just can't be pierced by any normal way. They need pain to wake up back to reality. There is only one way to deal with such a nuclear empire - like with USSR the Russians need to be pushed down to the level when they will lose any respect, fear of and obedience to their government while their government needs to be struck hard to lose economical and as result political power.
olliej 5y ago
It's super important that removing their internet services etc does not remove the propaganda, and Russia was passing laws prohibiting these sources of actual news from publishing said reality in Russia. The purpose of the sanctions is to reduce support for Putin from the people he actually needs to support his regime (russian billionaires, the government, the army, etc), and to cripple its ability to support its army.
JohnHaugeland 5y ago
> Instead comments seem to focus on how Russians deserve punishment, but how productive is this type of punishment? Historically, making the people hurt through sanction is the most effective way of getting rid of a dictator . > I would think it's an important goal to turn the Russians against Putin. They're paying $150 for days-old individual McDonalds burgers on the web This is how they get turned against Putin.
JumpCrisscross 5y ago
> comments seem to focus on how Russians deserve punishment, but how productive is this type of punishment? That's angry, polarized people giving into being cruel. It's understandable. I thought I was jaded, but the horrors coming out of Ukraine are breathtaking. But the Russian people deserve none of this, nor what is coming for them. There are two sanctions/decoupling strategies: a fast strategy and a slow strategy. The fast strategy aims to convince elites to change course. If Putin withdraws, he gets his economy back. That's unlikely here; the real targets are his generals. The slow strategy is about degrading capability. It's a worst-case fallback for when the fast strategy fails. Smaller economies power smaller war machines. Brain drain, industrial decay and material shortages make unmanageable threats less potent. Drawn-out sanctions undermine the appeal of popular uprising. External pressure tends to bring people together, which in this case means tolerating eroding freedoms in exchange for security. And starving, broken people don't revolt. When we deploy long-term sanctions, we're putting a nation in international quarantine. Despite the terrific cost, to ourselves and the innocent people there. The image of decades-long sanctions forcing people into the streets against their own government is a fantasy based on the fast-strategy success of the South African example.
tomp 5y ago
You don't get it. The sanctions aren't about punishing Russians, nor about getting Russians to reject Putin. It's all just virtue signalling. It's literally irrelevant what impact it has, if any.
agumonkey 5y ago
alternate communication channel: sanctions and systemic choking see https://twitter.com/kamilkazani/status/1501676859741904898 https://twitter.com/kamilkazani/status/1501676859741904898 for details maybe (maybe) putin reality distortion field can keep working, or maybe russian will start to wonder why everybody is leaving russia all of a sudden (including many russians).

by jolmg 5y ago

ardit33 5y ago

'Isolating Russia' -- Didn't they just ban FB and Twitter there? Aren't they cutting off their own internet as well? How is this the west doing? The west is not isolating them, just they are self isolating. All independent media had to shut down there.

jolmg 5y ago
> The west is not isolating them, just they are self isolating. Western services are also cutting them off. I get the sense that's helping Putin. An example: > Namecheap: Russia Service Termination https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30504812 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30504812 Maybe a DNS service is not the best example, but I feel like it's not the only service that I've seen do this. EDIT: Better example: > Internet backbone provider shuts off service in Russia https://www.theverge.com/2022/3/5/22962822/internet-backbone-provider-cogent-shuts-off-service-russia https://www.theverge.com/2022/3/5/22962822/internet-backbone...
- ardit33 5y ago
  And your point is? They can use their own services, nobody wants to prevent that. But guess what? Putin doesn't like its citizen's to be able to read outside sources and is shutting things outside access himself. Even BBC has to restart using AM radio for its russian services (not done since the Cold War). Stop 'victim playing' and blaming the west, when you should be blaming your leader for the massive censorship going on in Russia right now.
  - jolmg 5y ago
    > Stop 'victim playing' and blaming the west, when you should be blaming your leader for the massive censorship going on in Russia right now. TF? I'm not Russian. I put a better example.
  - KBme 5y ago
  - nix23 5y ago
    Look i get it, you are angry but stop telling people that their leader is someone and accuse them of "victim playing", was Trump your leader? Has anyone told you that you are playing victim? Was Bush Jr your leader the guy who attacked two Country's and lied about Chemical weapons in Iraq..where did i heard something like that lately? https://news.sky.com/story/ukraine-war-moscows-claims-of-biological-weapons-programme-in-war-hit-country-are-absurd-propaganda-says-us-12561787 https://news.sky.com/story/ukraine-war-moscows-claims-of-bio...
  - orbital-decay 5y ago
    It seems nobody here actually read the OP, jumping straight to the flamewar in comments. Lumen and Cogent already stopped peering with Russian ISPs. It's not Russian government, and they are doing the dirty work for the Russian government. This is not about punishment or providing services, this is about peering and basic connectivity at the backbone level. It can break the Internet as the common medium, and not just for Russia. This sets the precedent that undermines decades of development and can make the biggest contribution to peace in the history of humanity fall apart into different bubbles.
    - nix23 5y ago
      >can make the biggest contribution to peace in the history of humanity fall apart into different bubbles. Very powerful message and on point, it's no wonder every dictator shuts the net down when things start to turn/burn internally.
- fennecfoxen 5y ago
  The Internet — both the network backbone and the many websites that operate on the Internet — is mostly operated for profit, and running it isn't free. Collecting payment from Russian sources right now is dodgy; payment providers are unlikely to help, banks are sanctioned, and the risk of not getting paid is high. Moscow currency exchanges have been shut down, and we see the government decree that bonds denominated in foreign currencies will be paid in rubles. Certain foreign entities are seeing their property and businesses in Russia nationalized (as a kind of retaliation for ceasing business). This environment of elevated risk is ample reason for any international business to avoid business with Russian nationals, other Russian entities, and anything to do with Russia, generally, at this time. It is unfortunate that Russian citizens may see less of the outside world as a consequence of these high level sanctions and of this politically risky situation. It is not the responsibility of these operators to remedy that.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - dunkelheit 5y ago
    If history is any guide, businesses are totally ok with dodgy payment methods (Russia paid Pepsi with warships once) and dealing with governments that are not that respectful towards private property as long as profit is expected. The main risks now are reputational. Cynically, I would put it that way - withdrawing from Russia has gone viral, all the cool kids are doing it.
EugeneOZ 5y ago
There are examples in the article.

vernie 5y ago

Russia is isolating the Russians. Roskomnadzor is throttling and blocking the Russian people's access to the wider internet, not Western providers.

jolmg 5y ago
> not Western providers An example: > Namecheap: Russia Service Termination https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30504812 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30504812 EDIT: Better example: > Internet backbone provider shuts off service in Russia https://www.theverge.com/2022/3/5/22962822/internet-backbone https://www.theverge.com/2022/3/5/22962822/internet-backbone...
- vernie 5y ago
  I think the impact of this action compared to state internet censorship is insignificant.
  - jolmg 5y ago
    Right. I put a better example.
- ptero 5y ago
  OK, Western providers do this, too. But I think the much bigger problem is that all independent media, everything except reliably pro-Kremlin sources, is being very aggressively shut down from the inside. And that includes access to outside channels and programs. While I generally agree that the West should not be shutting down the information pipes, in this environment the additional harm of such actions may be minimal.
- sndean 5y ago
  I'm not sure Namecheap should be used as an example of a Western provider. While I think they're technically based in the US, according to their CEO they have many employees in one of the Ukrainian cities currently being bombed: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30506813 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30506813

itronitron 5y ago

Russians have been living with Putin in charge for the last twenty years. I doubt that anyone immune to the propaganda will suddenly start to believe it, and I also doubt that people that believe the propaganda could have their minds suddenly changed.

notahacker 5y ago
Or put more subtly, the sort of Russian that generally believes Russian media isn't particularly likely to have bought a VPN to access alternative perspectives if only their Visa/Mastercard still worked. The sort of Russian that would have done that is fairly unlikely to believe that the war must be going well because it's even harder for them to access Facebook.
- jolmg 5y ago
  Even if that's the case, it's still not helping.
  - brimble 5y ago
    Either access to the global Internet is not, in fact, economically valuable, or yes, it absolutely would help (in the sense of harming the Russian economy, that is)
    - jolmg 5y ago
      I'm not against harming their economy, but am against harming their access to information. I don't think doing the former necessitates doing the latter. In the cases where they overlap, I think the harm to the economy is negligible.
      - brimble 5y ago
        If the Russian government thought that the parts of the Internet they still allow were any threat, in excess of the economic or strategic benefit it provides, they'd have already cut it off. I think the viability of any kind of Internet-based propaganda war are badly over-estimated by its proponents, especially when the other side gets to filter out entire sites that are inconvenient. It works much better against a foe that's far more open (so, us).

gameswithgo 5y ago

Many of us believe that Internet or not will have basically no impact on this question of turning Russians against Putin. I have lived through the entire life of the Internet and seen only the exact opposite things happened that we all expected and hoped would happen with free and open access to information. Conspiracy theories thrived rather than got rebutted, political discourse worsened, it did not improve. The power of large corporations increased, power was not democratized. Perhaps without Internet young people will be bored and when young men are idle they tend to turn to the kind of violent uprising Russia probably needs.

jolmg 5y ago
> Perhaps without Internet young people will be bored and when young men are idle they tend to turn to the kind of violent uprising Russia probably needs. That seems way too improbable.

nix23 5y ago

Absolutely, what is the first thing a Dictator would do?...right shutdown the internet, but what if the Western "Community" shuts it down? An internet shutdown by someone else is the wet dream of the Government, Russnet (the russian Intranet) will still work and probably connected in the future to Xinet (name is TM by me, and ping is blocked on it). Two perfect Intranets, and probably also swift will get changed in the future with china as the exchange knot to russia and swift. That's a terrible decision for every Russian who wants to have a chance to find different information's.

chupasaurus 5y ago
In Russia the name Cheburnet was born from a speech of parliament's member who initiated the laws for the autonomous mode for ISPs, he threw something along the line "we'd basically get our own network, we could name it Cheburashka, for example".

trhway 5y ago

>The point on how isolating the Russians helps the propaganda seems like the most important take-away. Russians have had all the ability to watch the videos of Ukraine destruction and to get all the other true information about the war. They wouldn't. All together with Putin they have for 20 years been resurrecting the myth of "Great Russia", which in its current form is pretty much nazism (or like Ukrainians and Baltic countries usually call it "russism" ['rashizm']- short for "Russian Fascism"). Even directly facing the truth Russians refuse to believe it and dismiss it as fakes, propaganda, etc. They like to think of themselves as a "Big Brother liberating the smaller one". That is kind of mental blindness which just can't be pierced by any normal way. They need pain to wake up back to reality. There is only one way to deal with such a nuclear empire - like with USSR the Russians need to be pushed down to the level when they will lose any respect, fear of and obedience to their government while their government needs to be struck hard to lose economical and as result political power.

olliej 5y ago

It's super important that removing their internet services etc does not remove the propaganda, and Russia was passing laws prohibiting these sources of actual news from publishing said reality in Russia. The purpose of the sanctions is to reduce support for Putin from the people he actually needs to support his regime (russian billionaires, the government, the army, etc), and to cripple its ability to support its army.

JohnHaugeland 5y ago

> Instead comments seem to focus on how Russians deserve punishment, but how productive is this type of punishment? Historically, making the people hurt through sanction is the most effective way of getting rid of a dictator . > I would think it's an important goal to turn the Russians against Putin. They're paying $150 for days-old individual McDonalds burgers on the web This is how they get turned against Putin.

JumpCrisscross 5y ago

> comments seem to focus on how Russians deserve punishment, but how productive is this type of punishment? That's angry, polarized people giving into being cruel. It's understandable. I thought I was jaded, but the horrors coming out of Ukraine are breathtaking. But the Russian people deserve none of this, nor what is coming for them. There are two sanctions/decoupling strategies: a fast strategy and a slow strategy. The fast strategy aims to convince elites to change course. If Putin withdraws, he gets his economy back. That's unlikely here; the real targets are his generals. The slow strategy is about degrading capability. It's a worst-case fallback for when the fast strategy fails. Smaller economies power smaller war machines. Brain drain, industrial decay and material shortages make unmanageable threats less potent. Drawn-out sanctions undermine the appeal of popular uprising. External pressure tends to bring people together, which in this case means tolerating eroding freedoms in exchange for security. And starving, broken people don't revolt. When we deploy long-term sanctions, we're putting a nation in international quarantine. Despite the terrific cost, to ourselves and the innocent people there. The image of decades-long sanctions forcing people into the streets against their own government is a fantasy based on the fast-strategy success of the South African example.

tomp 5y ago

You don't get it. The sanctions aren't about punishing Russians, nor about getting Russians to reject Putin. It's all just virtue signalling. It's literally irrelevant what impact it has, if any.

agumonkey 5y ago

alternate communication channel: sanctions and systemic choking see https://twitter.com/kamilkazani/status/1501676859741904898 https://twitter.com/kamilkazani/status/1501676859741904898 for details maybe (maybe) putin reality distortion field can keep working, or maybe russian will start to wonder why everybody is leaving russia all of a sudden (including many russians).