U.S. firm Cogent cutting internet service to Russia
reuters.com
reuters.com
I know it's hard to target only the government and leadership with many of these punitive measures, but this broad-based measures that have a lot of collateral damage are pretty awful.
The young folks in Russia are using TikTok et al to find out what's really going on. These are the ones who will most be hurt. Those seeking the truth.
We need those folks to have information so they can push back.
This is why the BBC has a Tor service. [1]
I think the Roskomnadzor watchdog has pretty much preemptively done that already though no? And it's not just social media but things like the BBC and Deutsche Welle etc. See:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/mar/04/russia-complet...
and
https://www.rferl.org/a/russia-rferl-bbc-facebook-google-twi...
If someone is going to disconnect Russia from Internet it is going to be Russian themselves, to limit the free flow of information that might be conflicting with the official truth.
But like with the Chinese firewall, information find its way. Unless Russia wants to set itself back to 70s, they still need to access Github, Cloudflare, Amazon Cloudfront, etc. For the Russian IT business to work. It is going to be very inefficient to run anything with a pen and a paper.
Software development and Internet were built on scientific principles, criticism, criticial thinking. This requires free flow of information. You cannot have one without the other, or you are going to end up with very inferior and inefficient software ecosystem.
LOL. Do you really think the brass even know what it is?
Putin doesn't even know how the modern mobile phones look, he didn't needed one for more than 20 years.
To give you a slight idea how long it is - the famous Nokia 3310 was announced 9 months later than his (acting) presidency.
They can't. And they won't. Nice in theory but it's 2022 and here we are. Nobody is pushing back at all, in any meaningful way over there.
Some Russian citizens were saying they don't support the war and have nothing to do with it. These sanctions make it personal for them in a non-violent, non-lethal way.
We are trading Russians' convenience for Ukrainians' lives and, judging by Putin's tone today, it is working.
You will have to decide how to interpret it and whether he really believes it. It's not exactly a "let's de-escalate together" statement, but it certainly suggests sanctions are working.
"But mom, they got to do crime, why can't I do crime?"
Is this even an "illegal" war? I mean, other than by the standard of "every war is an illegal war"? Not taking sides (I don't know enough about the history and politics to do so), but I know Ukraine was part of Russia until very recently. If, somehow, Mexico had the means to do so and were to try to "take back" Texas... I can't help but wonder if the international response would be a lot more neutral than the response to Russia trying to "take back" Ukraine.
The Russian government acknowledged that hundreds of soldiers died, publicly. That’s not a tiny mission.
I'm sure the oligarchs are pissed at yacht seizures and banking discomfort too but so what? This is a valid tactic since they didn't attack a NATO member.
If they did, then they would be facing the same things that Ukrainian citizens are.
Russia flexes their might against their own citizens constantly and disrupts their quality of life. There's always going to be some that will be emboldened for the wrong reasons. But it doesn't make sense for nations to sit idly by.
The idea that citizens over there could organize with internet and actually accomplish any change is nonsense.
In retrospect we should have ground the Russian military to dust after ‘91. No aid without nuclear disarmament and population reeducation.
Hopefully when the dust settles this time, we don’t make the same mistakes.
And if ISPs stop providing service, how will protestors organize anyway? By laying cable in the ground themselves?
People keep saying this, but it’s not even close to accurate. The Shah, Marcos, Ceaușescu, and Mubarak come to mind.
And, I vaguely remember something in the USSR in ‘91.
If you were to rank who is to blame for the sanctions why is the West in the top position? Why not the party responsible? If you tug on the thread of "why is this happening?" one thing seems clear: for no reason worth the discomfort.
As long as Putin can re-interpret this as an external aggression from the $insert_pejorative West, and broadcast that better than Twitter, CNN, etc, I can see those sanctions having an opposite effect and further solidify his power.
On the other hand, I can see attacking those who are closer to him being a lot more effective. His billionaire friends not being able to travel to south of France for vacation is a much more serious threat than a regular person who cannot use Apple Pay or watch Netflix any longer.
There's an ethical argument against it: "hey lets punish innocent civilians so they attack the real enemy" and a practical argument: "hey russia started the conflict, but didnt cut-off your internet, that was a US company that sees you as their enemy"
The next time the USA invades someone I welcome for you to destroy my financial life and drive my family and I into subsistence farming if it helps to stop us. You have my permissions.
stop doing war.
I dont understand the point of conflating a nation and its citizens here. There are Russians that live in the US, and americans that live in Russia. There are warmongers in all countries, as pacifists in all countries.
> The next time the USA invades someone I welcome for you to destroy my financial life and drive my family and I into subsistence farming if it helps to stop us. You have my permissions.
Can we put this into a contract? I'm more than willing to be the recipient of your funds if this came to pass.
Also realize that statistically speaking you likely didn't dissent when we invaded Iraq. We were propagandized and consent was manufactured via the NYT and others. If your family was driven into poverty as a result, I don't believe you would have welcomed it whatsoever.
That's not how war works.
Have you considered that these actions might provoke and prolong greater conflict?
Uh, you mean like Iraq, Afghanistan, or Syria? I don't think whataboutism is a good argument for sanctions here. Sanctions are a balancing act between inconveniencing the regime and inconveniencing their people. There's a calculus to consider. You're acting as if this is a new tenet of international diplomacy or something.
He is just criticizing people who criticize sanctions. From his perspective, the cost of sanctions is trivial compared to the cost of war.
No whataboutism here.
"Man, you people who when babies are being exploded and apartment buildings attacked with missiles, an entire nation being invaded, who ask these questions about inconveniencing citizens of the attacking nation, are you even real? The next time the USA invades someone I welcome for you to destroy my financial life and drive my family and I into subsistence farming if it helps to stop us. You have my permissions.
stop doing war."
To whom?
That’s kinda how war works. I think a lot of the folks criticizing you are in a position of privilege, or have an interesting perspective on what open warfare really means.
Apply pressure to the country until you get the results you want. I can appreciate the focus on Putin and his cronies, but no one gets out untouched.
Also consider that sanctions as a result of the Crimea annexation haven't done anything. We're still here, today, 8 years later, and Putin is waging war again. The funny thing is that when I was looking for something about this, I found an article[0] that is generally positive about the effects of sanctions on Russia post-Crimea. Which I find kinda hilarious, because I think it really proves the point here that these sanctions don't actually work. The Russian economy slowed quite a bit, but it seems clear Putin and the oligarchs don't care all that much; the harm from those sanctions were disproportionately borne by regular Russian citizens, who were powerless to change the country's foreign policy. And, regardless, Russia is still in control of Crimea, and has not deterred Putin from this current war, so... that's a pretty big hint the sanctions did not do what they were supposed to.
[0] https://www.nato.int/docu/review/articles/2015/07/13/sanctio...
Of course Russia is a different situation, and there are already plenty of Russian citizens there protesting the war, but I find it a little hard to believe that peaceful protest works all that well in what is effectively a dictatorship. (Hell, consider how ineffective -- or at best, excruciatingly slow-acting -- anti-war protests have been in even the US since WWII.)
I expect the only thing that could get Putin to stop would be his oligarch cronies getting financially destroyed to the point that they can't take it anymore. But it seems like they've been preparing for this for a while, and might not be hurt by sanctions as much as we'd expect. Regardless, if we assume that the oligarchs and government officials are the right people to target, broad-based measures that hurt regular Russians are just cruel and probably not that effective.
Look at Iran now: a pariah state whose power has been effectively contained, limited in its ability to fund a substantial warchest or buy modern weapons & technology. It's currently working with the US on a new nuclear deal to ameliorate its heavy sanctions.
Russia can look forward to a similar future. Military invasions cost a lot of resources, the current invasion is largely funded by European gas sales and a variety of foreign trade. Aside from weapons & tech, military morale is an important factor in combat effectiveness, but it's also affected by resource availability. A less resourced military is a less capable one.
We're beyond just deterrence now. Russian citizens can blame everyone except Putin, it doesn't matter. What does matter is that when Putin's military lackeys draw up plans, when they threaten others, they do so with a fraction of the tech and resources they are used to. Let's see them bully a 21st century world with a 20th century economy.
At the risk of invoking Godwin's law, I wouldn't be surprised seeing Putin going fully fascist to hold together a Russia that's disintegrating.
Another angle which I think people are missing out on is the impact to business. For all the economic sanctions around payments, lack of internet access will prevent many Russian companies from functioning AT ALL even internally to Russia.
I still don't support this move, but its interesting to think about just how many company processes would be bricked as a result of this action - picture tens of thousands of employees sitting in an empty chair or being sent home without any work to do.
It's a bit maddening because the reactions are mostly trash and completely unhelpful since the people who take these decisions are usually clueless when it comes to foreign relations. It can even be counter productive, because I'm sure that if this would've hurt russia in any meaningful way the state department would've probably pushed for these sanctions in the first place.
Maybe this is not a recent trend at all but from my perspective it has been much more apparent in the past 2 years. Just compare this to back when corporations/non profits were pretty keen to open businesses in say, the Soviet Union or China with every loophole they can find instead of doing the exact opposite like we see now. Or internet corps trying to open new markets and connect as many people as they could instead of...this?
An amusing example I just read about is Tony's Chocoloney, an "edible virtue signal":
https://thenewconservative.co.uk/tonys-chocbaloney/
What's interesting is how often this blows up in the faces of the people doing it. Tony's Chocolate seems to have mostly just infuriated customers with its actions. If anyone is actually buying this chocolate bar because it makes them feel virtuous it's hard to notice.
At some point smart CEOs are going to crack down on this stuff. It was the founder of Hacker News who said "keep your identity small". Probably that'll come back into fashion as awareness grows of how destructive letting insecure marketing interns emotionally bully executives is.
But we're also in the middle of propaganda war, and the west has to be "doing something", if the result is good or bad, it doesn't really matter.
It's not an idea. US-based companies have to comply with sanctions.
Regardless, I was more talking about the overall situation: hurting your enemy's citizens when those citizens have essentially zero power to affect the situation is just cruel and pointless. And can turn those citizens -- many of whom may be anti-war themselves -- against you.
It will be interesting to look back at how all these bad moralistic takes on geopolitics influenced the media narrative and pressured leaders and companies into hard-line stances against Russia, thus helping to cause whatever escalation is coming down the line. No longer can nations quietly engage in realpolitik to avert disaster. The populace is too engaged and information is too widespread, and the demand for retribution is universal. It would be naive to think the decision makers are immune to the moral narratives coming out of the media.
This is exactly what sanctions do.
The sad reality is that if the Russian army (composed by Russians) is successful, all Russian citizens including those who suffer would gladly "inherit" the raw resources, land and properties (those left intact) from Ukrainians without passing a tear. Putin's "Make Russia great again" plan would be cheered unanimously in Russia
If the Russian army fails, Russians have an unique in life opportunity of having Putin out of power. Ukraine instead keeps a country partially destroyed, or totally destroyed, or with big chunks unlivable for decades, and take huge loses in all their infrastructures and lives.
Some Russian people seem to want the gain without the pain.
So more of them can protest. Not sure if you've seen the latest news and videos, Russians aren't even trying to fight soldiers anymore, they're just straight-up bombing apartment complexes...
I have absolutely no sympathy for any Russian until there's no more bombs killing Ukrainian civilians. Maybe more incentive to depose Putin.
You have no sympathy for people who will be beaten, jailed or worse for simply peacefully protesting the war their country is waging?
And I might if Russia wasn't literally bombing apartments without even attempting to fight the Ukrainian military...
They should think about what living with Putin for another 15 years will look like...
What precisely do you think happens to those organizers in Russia when they defy their dear leader's sacred mission? A brief stint in jail? I think the best case scenario is nothing cruel happens to their family. But their life is essentially forfeit.
Besides, we had the largest protests in US history to prevent the invasion of Iraq. I was at many of them. They did absolutely nothing to stop that war.
Yeah, there is a point where the regime switches from handcuffs to tanks and machine guns to discourage repeats.
(And, yes, enough, particularly of the people in the right positions, can defeat that, too, but the outcome tends to be ... unpredictable.)
The fall of the Russian Empire in 1917 happened at such a different time in world history (smaller differences between the state's military capabilities and individuals military capabilities, more diffused knowledge of warfare among civilians due to frequent occurrence of wars, greater difficulty in monitoring communications due to older forms of technology, etc) that it doesn't serve to offer many lessons to modernity.
If anything Putin's Russia is much closer to China during the 1989 Tiananmen Square movement than Gorbachev's USSR.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hungarian_Revolution_of_1956
Without the protests, the coup by forces not willing to give up the USSR against Gorbachev would have succeeded.
Vietnam, Central America, Libya, Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria. Never-ending, ongoing economic sanctions leveled against a myriad of countries which destroy the lives of ordinary people.
Israel, whose oppression against the Palestinians we actively support and fund, blows up an apartment building in the Gaza Strip and it makes the news for a day, and here we are incredulous when this happens in the Ukraine. We are, this very moment, engaged in the wanton murder of civilians, either directly through drone strikes or indirectly via the supply of weapons, like the ones used to bomb Yemenese today.
What then of your sanctimony? Where the hell is your outrage towards and condemnation of Americans, or of NATO or other US allies that tolerate our behavior? Americans and our allies objectively share responsibility for the largest portion of the sum total of evil acts occurring on this planet, and yet most of us, like you, act and speak as if this isn’t the case. Absurd.
The US doing shitty things doesn't mean Russia isn't doing shitty things, right now.
This is a strawman.
Whataboutism and a tangent though for sure.
If you think that limiting a population's access to imported goods can lead to regime change via "grassroots change", just look at the myriad of counterexamples: Cuba, Iraq, Iran, Venezuela, Syria, North Korea.
The sanctions imposed by the governments against Russia make sense: they aim at crippling the state economy to prevent Russia from waging war and dismantling the power structure by pitting elites against each other.
But limiting access to information for ordinary people is a completely empty gesture that brings no value into the world.
Why not cut off phone communication too? Maybe postal mail as well? Did we ever stop delivering mail and cut the phones to Germany and Japan during WWII?
Internet access should be a human right and any attempts to limit it should be decried regardless of context.
Source: am an irritated Cogent customer with no other options in our office building.
We should be beaming free internet service down on Russia so there are as many opportunities as possible for Russian citizens to route around censorship, shine light on propaganda, and organize.
It’s not so clear cut.
C1) This is just hurting ordinary Russian citizens and serves no other purpose. I empathize strongly with the Russians. But I also empathize with the Ukrainians. Since Russia has nuclear weapons, the only thing rest of the world can do is impose sanctions. Sanctions work in the long run, but they take a long time to show effects. Ukrainians do not have a long time. All of these moves will cumulatively amplify the unrest among common Russian people, giving Putin less time to sit back and let his plan go to work. Will these be enough? Only time can tell. But ignoring the impact of secondary and tertiary effects for the primary negative effects is short sighted.
C2) This is just virtue signaling. Virtue signaling may be a component of this move, but this is business for Cogent. They make money moving data, and Russian money has lost a lot of its value. So I am not convinced this is just virtue signaling, there is definitely a business component.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tier_1_network#List_of_Tier_1_...
Also Cogent sucks but I guess you could say that about most providers.
I deplore what Putin is doing in Ukraine. This is a war of aggression undertaken because he is scared of the democracy in Ukraine making its way to Moscow (i.e. Russians wanting democracy too).
But. Ensuring Russians can see a view of the world not provided to them by Putin is critical to stopping him and those like him. It gives them access to news on what is happening in Ukraine and gives us news on what is happening in Russia. Cutting off the internet makes his life a lot easier.
I can only imagine people from the State Department to newsrooms to the CIA are hitting their foreheads repeatedly on their respective desks.
What leads to revolution are ideas and belief of success. Cutting off the internet seems counter productive.
As a Russian myself i'm ashamed and disgusted by all the Russian whining. Russia is at war, the genocidal war that is criminally started and is being criminally conducted by Russia, and instead of whining the Russians should grace the God that they have plummeting rouble instead of falling bombs like Ukrainians have gotten. You need to completely lose any shame to expect any quality of life while your country is genociding a neighbor.
Wrt. the myth of "regular Russians" - it is regular Russians and their children who shoots in Ukraine, not Putin. In the years leading to that the whole society was ostracizing anybody who have voiced even minor disagreement with Putin's fascist regime. The FSB and police supposedly oppressing Russians consist of those regular Russians and their children, not some aliens from Alfa Centauri.
It is pretty clear that the reality still hasn't set on Russians, and until that happens the pressure should grow, the faster the better. The only way of dealing with a nuclear country is to put so much stress on it that it breaks from inside.
Here we go again with this nonsense.
I wonder why they didn’t cut off their internet service off in the 2020 US election if they didn’t want their service to be used for disinformation or cyber attacks? Maybe Cogent should learn how it is done in Uganda [0] and the Republic of Congo [1] then?
At this point with any service, the ‘disinformation’ reason is becoming an excuse to execute such unnecessarily extreme actions guaranteed to always backfire and it is exactly what Putin wants as it doesn’t stop ‘disinformation’.
Mission Accomplished. /s
[0] https://www.france24.com/en/live-news/20210118-uganda-eases-...
[1] https://netblocks.org/reports/internet-shutdown-in-the-repub...
Russia cutting access to US company bad.
Weird
Russia Takes a Big Step Toward Internet Isolation (Jan '20)
https://www.wired.com/story/russia-internet-control-disconne...
ISP: *cuts off Russia from Internet*
MOB: ¿¿¿why Russians don't know what is happening outside off Russia???
When you want the same as your enemy that is strange.