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Comment by compsciphd | Hacker News Reader

how does removing .ru dns cut the russian man-on-the-street from interational news and perspectives.

dns is not ip addresses. all that means is russian websites would stop working via normal dns, not that ip addresses would stop routing and non .ru would continue to resolve normally.

the only thing I can imagine is that it would cut them off because russia et al would then take the step to cut them off (which they sort of do already)

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Regardless of what you think about this possible course of action, this is totally disingenuous. It’s like saying that 40 years ago removing some businesses from the yellow pages didn’t mean you couldn’t still call them - that’s technically correct, but you’d better have them in your address book already or know someone who does. Compound that problem with 1) needing a much bigger address book, 2) phone numbers changing and the same business potentially having many phone numbers to different parts of their business, 3) never having used a phone book before and not even having an address book to start with (using an IP address is totally out of the ordinary for many people, and may not even be supported by applications other than a web browser. If suddenly all the sites I visited were no longer available through my usual DNS providers, I wouldn’t be able to visit them).

the point I was making, just removing .ru resolution, doesn't prevent them from accessing international sites. .com will still resolve. assuming google doesn't do ip filtering, seting your dns to 8.8.8.8 (or cloudflare or others) and .com will still resolve even if they remove the roots running in russia.

.ru isn’t the Yellow Pages, Google is

.ru is like one area code

> dns is not ip addresses. all that means is russian websites would stop working via normal dns, not that ip addresses would stop routing and non .ru would continue to resolve normally

A “man on the street” isn’t browsing via IP address, and in the modern days of TLS SNI, you practically can’t just type in IP addresses to visit websites anyway. Names matter.

but removing .ru resolution doesn't prevent someone from resolving www.google.com

Not all .ru sites are state-owned.

again, not what I was arguing against. the argument was removing .ru resolution would prevent russians from reading international media to see how the rest of the world is seeing it.

I dont understand how one can make that argument with a straight face.

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