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Comment by vbezhenar | Hacker News Reader

While I'm not from Russia, I guess I have to move domains to the registrar in my country. It's just not safe to do any business abroad, when I can't go to the court in case of anything happens and all my property could be seized if someone wouldn't like actions of my government.

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I think it's pretty ironic, considering that that's probably the one thing domain owners in Russia wouldn't want - the Russian government being able to seize the domain.

Yep, Russian citizens seem to be between hammer and anvil. I'm personally not afraid of government seizing my domain as it's just personal mail and I'm nobody important. But for something more controversial like opposition website that might be hard indeed.

> I'm personally not afraid of government [...] I'm nobody important

Yeah, it always starts like that until somebody doesn't like your nose, religion or whatever.

Exactly. This is helping Putin build his own "national Internet" that they've been talking about for so long. And the more successful he is at that, the more isolated Russians will be from world news, and the more exposed to Russian propaganda (which is already hysterical).

Doesn't the Russian government control the .ru TLD? Can't they just seize it regardless?

I have a .net

Yeah, this is breeding more isolationism and distrust; now I have to take nationalistic concerns into account when choosing service providers, and wonder who else might pull a Namecheap in the future.

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