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Comment by Havoc | Hacker News Reader

I'd be very surprised if it every gets to a stage where you literally can't break out from Russia into TOR or VPN or whatever.

Sure China has done it, but that seems non trivial and looking at the current state of their offensive and well army I'd say Russia probably have more urgent priorities right now

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Russian government has no money to implement something like Chinese Great Firewall but feels an urgent need to censor online space so more likely scenario is a complete cut-off from an external world (like in North Korea). Russian ISPs has been tasked to prepare to operate all networks inside the country in isolated mode - like a huge LAN. Will it happen - no one knows for sure but there is a real possibility.

Even then, I can see a real market potential for bootleg sneakernet [1] dealers. VHS bootleg of western movies being dubbed by a single person were all the rage in the late 80’s Soviet countries [2]. If the internet is fully closed off, a new market for sneakernet of Internet segments would evidently emerge.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sneakernet

[2] https://jacobinmag.com/2017/07/soviet-voice-over-cold-war-te...

A major difference is that in China it's one-sided. Here we also have other countries cutting Russia off.

Even in China I think you can get around it or at least you could when I was last there although there was a little more hassle than in other countries. See https://www.vpnmentor.com/blog/best-free-vpns-china/ for example.

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