Assuming the Netherlands was acting unnilaterally, Russian ISPs would be able to coordinate with other ISPs to get back online via other routes. Assuming Russia's enemy wanted to press the issue, it would quickly devolve into a political question of who wants to allow Russian peering, who does not, and who is willing to not peer with peers of Russia (and peers of peers, etc).
This has always been the case. The internet is a network of networks; all of which are subject to control by their host governments should they choose to exercise it. With or without RPKI, a partitioning of the Internet for a significant period of time was always going to be a political decision.
Until other networks choose to exorcise them and their control with it. If you play unfairly often enough, you get depeered.
Also, the registries are already capable of unilaterally transferring Russia's IP space to somebody else, so if they transferred it to AWS (for example) and they immediately started using it, this would have a similar effect, except this couldn't be fixed by toggling a switch, since it would mean that people would need to choose between connecting to either Russia or AWS.
Would you stand by this statement if we did s/Netherlands/United States/g ?
It's not about the governments of today, but those of the future.
There is imho very little to gain from such a move, and potentially a lot to lose. Disconnecting a whole society in such a way would make the total government control even easier.
Edit: typo
But no, getting yourself in a situation where you're dependent on cowboy regimes for critical resources is not good for the people.
Liquified Natural Gas aka LNG is a major US export product. The American export a lot of methane ("natural gas") this way to EU countries.
I have no idea which of many factors you didn't understand here but it's a bad sign
[Edited to correct s/expert/export/]
Are they stupid and can't think for themselves? The Netherlands have strong democratic tradition and great public education system. Why would they be influenced by a foreign government? I always find it amusing.
It also enables the spreading of fears of greater foreign influence and much else.
It generally gives you a very distorted view of the world.
Idk why you think knee-jerking "social media" adds any substance.
I am not ignoring it, I am agreeing with it.
> The effectiveness of any foreign influence on political life should be studied. AFAIK, it's still a matter of debate.
Agreed it needs more studying, but social media does does have influence, and its a reasonable assumption that that influence can be manipulated. It does definitely influence people who spend a lot of time on social media - they are very prone to believe conspiracy theories for example.
How effectively such manipulation can be varies and itself becomes a political issue. The PM of the UK recently implied that the Brexit vote was swayed by the Russians but was swiftly shot down (by members his own cabinet and the head of the internal intelligence service among others.).
> It's a bunch of statements that need good evidence behind them.
Not every opinion needs a set of citations.
It doesn't if you're fine with it not being worth much.
Unfortunately, for the same reason that Russian influence found fertile ground in the US (MAGA), France (both le Pen and Melenchon), Germany (AfD and BSW), Italy (Berlusconi, Salvini), Hungary (Orban/Fidesz), Poland (PiS), Slovakia (Fico), the UK (UKIP, Reform, and relating to Brexit, the Tories)...
Unchecked globalization has led to serious economic devastation, and Russian propaganda picked that up and blamed it all on immigrants, and added a bunch of LGBT hate on top because that serves as a decent wedge issue for a group of the population that the anti-immigrant stuff doesn't catch that much. And on top of that, they made the immigration issue so much worse - Libya, Syria, Afghanistan and Iran all have Russia's bloody fingerprints all over them.
And as we're seeing, even the best democratic tradition doesn't stand a chance against economic misfortune.
And the countries that did the work to rein capitalism in, in a proper way, are doing well, also in the circumstances of globalisation.
Unchecked globalism leads to unchecked capitalism as it creates a race to the bottom. Unchecked capitalism leads to unchecked globalism as it continuously seeks to lower wages.
As Italian, I would say that the most pro Russia party are M5S (Conte even invited Russian soldiers to help us against COVID) and Futuro Nazionale (Vannacci). Even AVS and part of the PD are "pro-peace", AKA pro-Russia.
Salvini said that he is pro Putin, but Legal voted to send weapons to Ukraine.
This fact is why I think regardless of governing ideology, it's in the interests of any government to not write off wide-spread destitution and inequality as merely the cost of participating in a global economy. Even the Romans two thousand years before us understood all regimes require their bread and circuses, and the first one is the more important of the two.
As a Briton it's a particularly frustrating time to live here. We have wasted the 'peace dividend' on luxury policies like giving incumbent homeowners massive regulatory power to constrain the housing supply with lots of harmful knock-on effects, putting economic stupidity like Brexit to a constitution-breaking and divisive referendum, and harmfully constraining the energy supply by letting every self-interested QUANGO and NIMBY block renewable/nuclear power and the associated infrastructure. We spent more on the paperwork before a single shovel entered the ground on a tunnel under the Thames than Norway did building the longest road tunnel in the world. We cannot continue enacting nonsense policies like this and expecting everyone to muddle through as things get bleaker and bleaker, it'll come to a head one day and when it does it'll be destabilising.
Economic prosperity, or at the very least not having lost decade after lost decade, is necessary to avoid more authoritarian forms of politics coming to power.
I'm not opposed to voting on EU membership in general, but the way the actual referendum was conducted was poor and it's increasingly clear that Russia attempted to interfere with it as well. Compare it to the Scottish referendum which was pretty well-conceived, the Brexit referendum looks amateurish in comparison. The reason is because it had very little to do with the government suddenly sprouting a love of participatory democracy, and everything to do with Cameron thinking that because he had won one referendum and ostensibly stopped the Scottish nationalists for a generation he could do the same to UKIP and the right of his own party.
In my view the vote should have been held, a democracy is only a democracy if it's allowed to make potentially harmful decisions for itself. However it should not have been rushed into being with zero regard for how it might test the constitution or what a leave vote actually meant, in my view the consequences of a leave vote should have been characterised and defined well in advance; all the debate between 'hard Brexit' or 'soft Brexit' should have happened before the date of the vote was set. It also should have been more credibly secured against Russian influence in light of the threats to democratic integrity that were new at the time, the government appears to have been genuinely lax on this front. They couldn't have carried it out in a more division-generating way if they'd been trying in my opinion, and it's because they rushed it for risky party-political reasons.
The keyword is "attempted". Its also clear they did not succeed in doing so
What part of the constitution does a referrendum break? One of the main principles of British constitutional law is that Parliament is supreme.
This is why I think it was constitution-breaking, the constitution simply isn't set up to gracefully deal with a conflict between 'Brexit must happen' and 'Parliament cannot agree on how to carry out Brexit'. All of this against the ticking clock of Article 50 as well. Instead Boris Johnson ended up brute-forcing his way through the issue with the 2019 election and the purge of his non-Brexiteer MPs. The system did ultimately hold up (even in the face of Johnson's prorogation crisis), but I think Cameron was very irresponsible. Not for holding the referendum, but for not figuring out all the potential complexities of a leave vote before calling the referendum. The constitution got an uncontrolled stress test that didn't need to happen the way it did.
Also to add to that, the limits of Parliamentary sovereignty really were tested with respect to things like the Northern Ireland peace agreement during the Brexit negotiations.
With the growing threat profiles and potential damage, I wonder the cost calculations being made behind closed doors right now of both governments and companies about that very possibility.
A lot of companies already block traffic by country of origin and have since they existed on the internet.
Is this an American thing? For example the home Depot and velera do it.
If Sarah owns a gardening center and sells stuff locally, why does her business need to accept connections to her website or network from a foreign country? For her given the attack risk, it makes much more sense to block non-local traffic.
It's incredibly effective at keeping the trash script kiddies out, which is why companies and governments and people do it. It's also part of zerotrust networking, limiting access only from places that need it and when.
How do you get access to China today, or Russia?
However, if you mandated blocking Russia or China at a national level, you would cause some major issues.
a) it would become very hard to communicate with people in China. That would make commerce with China very difficult. Blocking communication with your number 3 trading partner [1] is going to be a massive disruption.
b) Doing the same for Russia would be less disruptive as there's much less trade between the US and Russia, and significantly fewer immigrants to the US from Russia than from China. However, there's still a lot of connection between the US and Russia and that would be disrupted.
Given the success of the internet and the layering of everything else over it, I suspect cutting off internet would likely cut off phone service as well. Even postal mail might be impacted, as there is likely coordination between national agencies via the internet.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_the_largest_trading_pa...
As for Russia, good riddance.
Do you honestly think the world would be better if there was no international law, or legal constraints on ISPs? Do you think BGP operators are somehow supra legal?
The registry system we live in has operated for almost 3 decades now, an inheritance of a prior informal arrangement. It's a mutuality. If you want to change it, get involved in it's policy process.
It is designed for fallbacks or ability to reroute when connections become congested or get cut.
Real world decentralized communication would not require an ISP and could operate by proxy with multi modes of communication. This way you can circumvent Government restrictions.
Sneaker net is decentralized and how North Koreans circumvent their government.
https://www.theguardian.com/law/2026/feb/18/international-cr...
Of course you are correct - the US is also ruled by a narcissistic oligarch who inflicts violence on other nations for ego building purposes.
Yes. It was the vision of the internet to continue on outside of the whatever political whims some tiny slice of western governments.
It’s just too ripe for abuse.
You can make whatever “whatabout” arguments on DNS, etc but none of those are required to get connectivity (DHT, p2p hosts, tor names, etc).
Any centralization around the narrow middle IP layer of the internet should be treated with extreme skepticism and pushback.
https://www.hrw.org/news/2002/08/03/us-hague-invasion-act-be...
https://www.reuters.com/world/us-imposes-sanctions-internati...
If there is a central and core theme with the Internet and all the organizations that manage the core infrastructure is the effort to avoid splitting the root.
But … cutting off Russia wouldn’t be such a bad thing.
The amount of folks that excuse a lot of garbage people in power do these days for the free speech maximalists is insane to me.
Copyright infringement is the other big excuse. People like Louis Rossmann get their journalism taken down because they showed 3 seconds of something relevant to the story.
Vinge didn't quite get to see his rogue AI prediction become (sort of) reality, right on schedule, but he did at least outlive Credit Suisse.
Having a system like this is like signing an agreement. Its only worth anything so long as people decide to respect it. If operators overplay their hand, people might stop respecting it.
Yes, and? This would be a boon for the rest of the world.