U.S. Eases Off Telecom Sanctions That Could Encourage A Russian Splinternet
from the first-do-no-harm dept
As Russia has faced a flood of sanctions for its brutal invasion of Ukraine, many telecom companies, like Lumen and Cogent, also stopped feeding and financing key Internet transit routes into the country. Other companies, like domain registrar Namecheap, made the choice to stop doing business with any current residents of Russia.
While severing Russia from the broader Internet may have felt good for those with a conscience, numerous organizations like The Internet Society warned the decision would likely only help Putin’s goal of a Russian “splinternet,” while potentially harming Russian independent media, human rights defenders, and anti-war protesters.
Putin for years has pushed to isolate Russian citizens from the broader Internet for two major reasons: it’s easier to spy on Russian citizens if they’re only using Russian telecom providers and Russian-based applications and services, and it’s easier to lie to the Russian public using propaganda if the only information they receive comes from Russian information sources.
While a little belated, the U.S. Treasury Department appears to have figured this out, and last week issued a new General License to exempt some communications services, software, hardware, and other connectivity-related technologies (web hosting, domain name registration services, email service companies) from U.S. sanctions against Russia.
The move was in response to a letter by numerous advocacy organizations urging such a license, and warning that broadly blocking Russian citizens from the broader Internet would likely have the reverse impact many had intended:
Access to the internet is essential to the protection of freedom of expression, access to information, and free association, and is increasingly recognized as a human right. Journalism and independent media depend on access to secure and reliable information technologies to document events inside contested areas, and to enable people to bypass state controls on information. Overly broad restrictions on the access of the Russian people to the internet would further isolate the embattled pro-democracy and anti-war activists, and impede the ability of NGOs, human rights groups, journalists, and attorneys inside and outside Russia to provide critical information to citizens about the current state of affairs and their rights. These actions would inadvertently speed up what the Kremlin has set out to achieve through its “sovereign internet” tools – a complete and total control of information space inside Russia.
Companies have every prerogative to make business decisions based on ethical considerations. Namecheap’s leadership informed me, for example, that the company has numerous employees in Ukraine and simply couldn’t, in good conscience, continue to do business in the country.
At the same time, there’s an absolute parade of experts warning that severing the Russian public from the Internet will only make them more susceptible to domestic surveillance and propaganda, something Putin was pushing for (with decidedly mixed success) long before the war began.
Filed Under: censorship, filters, internet, open internet, propaganda, russia, Russian splinternet
Comments on “U.S. Eases Off Telecom Sanctions That Could Encourage A Russian Splinternet”
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Ounce Of Prevention
At this point, I can’t imagine Russia wants to go back. The sales license may net some profits for western organizations, but there is certaintly now a major effort underway for Russia to become completely unreliant. These purchases are merely going to buy them some time.
More interesting, however, is the wakeup call for other belligerent countries that they need to begin reevaluating their own infrastructure, as Russia has done, lest someday they experience the same cutoff.
Re:
There is, certainly, a large push from Putin, his government, and other elites. Having spent a large time hearing from Russia-based content creators and gamers, I can’t necessarily agree there is the support to switch to an isolated splinternet among the people, and without support for the adoption of a purely Russian built internet by the people, so long as the wider internet is available the adoption will be more Truth Social than twitter.
I also question how much development Russia could really do while the economy is in shambles and they have a war to pay for, if the core network sanctions are lifted making the effort duplicative of available resources.
We have the experience of the North Korean public, and largely of the Chinese public, for reactions to internet limitations.
Re:
Throw Singapore into that group as well.
Singapore uas largely open access to the internet, but has an amazing control of information to the point where even one of the “anti-government” forums is owned… by the government.