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Comment by patall | Hacker News Reader

Do you have examples for Europe blocking Russia? Because all I have seen is DNS providers omitting certain sites (i.e RT), but their apps still work (plus URLs when using other DNS). An nothing of that coming from the nation states as all seems to be due to the activities of private companies doing these things.

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RT, Sputnik and related Russian state media outlets are subject to sanctions in the EU, their broadcast licenses have been revoked and their channels have been removed from terrestrial, cable and satellite broadcasts. Their accounts on all major social media platforms are blocked. Their apps are no longer available on the Google or Apple stores. Europe doesn't have a Chinese-style Great Firewall, but EU countries have taken every reasonable step to prevent Russian state media from reaching EU audiences.

https://www.politico.eu/article/russia-rt-sputnik-illegal-eu...

https://www.ofcom.org.uk/news-centre/2022/ofcom-revokes-rt-b...

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/03/01/youtube...

https://www.reuters.com/technology/exclusive-google-blocks-r...

> Europe doesn't have a Chinese-style Great Firewall, but EU countries have taken every reasonable step to prevent Russian state media from reaching EU audiences.

Because they think the EU audiances are stupid?

Because they don't like anti-government point of views to become too widespread.

In Italy the current defence minister is personally earning considerable amount of money by sending weapons to Ukraine, because he's also an owner and manager of companies that make said weapons.

Do you think they'd want to favour open discussions?

No. In fact besides RT being banned, they want to be able to block any website, giving providers 30 minutes to implement the ban, no appeal and no oversight from a judge (https://stop-piracy-shield.it/)

> In Italy the current defence minister is personally earning considerable amount of money by sending weapons to Ukraine, because he's also an owner and manager of companies that make said weapons.

FUD is the reason why Russian liars are banned from EU.

Well italy allows the openly racist newspaper "libero" to be open. I don't think FUD is a main concern when blocking websites.

It's part of the EU sanctions, EU ISPs are required to block certain Russian sites. But they didn't specify how, that's left up to the countries to figure out afaik. But as you say, some of the what has been done barely qualifies.

Here's my personal experience with this:

Germany does exactly what you describe, the bare minimum to say "we're blocking" --- DNS omitting certain sites.

Spain is doing deep packet inspection, blocking DNS requests that lookup RT, so DNS over HTTPS or through a VPN is a must. Additionally, they're also reading the SNI in TLS requests and blocking that way. If you try accessing RT in pure unencrypted HTTP you're get some fortigate blocking message back.

It is still perfectly possible to access RT from Spain, even using regular ISP DNS servers.

That's not my experience with Movistar, they are throwing down the gauntlet

mullivad has a free to use DNS over https service by the way.

Thanks, though that specifically why I am questioning that it is the EU in this case. Because rt.com is reachable in Sweden just fine, including sub-sites. Which, to me, says that it must be national sanctions, or at minimum, national lists of what to 'block'.

Because rt.com is reachable in Sweden just fine, including sub-sites.

See discussion further down thread, but basically the block in Sweden seems to be on the ISP level and depends on which ISP you have. I can access rt.com via work wifi, but not not over mobile data via Telia. Another user who has Telia as their home ISP cannot access rt.com from home either.

At least in the UK, you used to be able to watch RT on broadcast. Now only the Internet version is accessible, and I think some ISPs DNS block them. Granted, a DNS block is easy to circumvent if you understand it, but most users will still be cut off.

As a total outlier, RT was paying the cable/sat systems to be carried in US/Canada, instead of the other way around.

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/rts-purchase-of-cana...

https://www.wsj.com/articles/rt-channels-unique-carriage-dea...

I wonder if other countries were the same.

That’s not really an outlier. Common for political networks, religious channels, shopping networks….

Probably more than half the channels on a typical American cable system are paying to be there. Especially the stuff in the basic tiers.

Was it actually broadcast terrestrially? I remember picking it up from Astra2 (the "skytv" satellite) but looking online, it's not transmitted anymore.

I used to watch it on Freeview, picked up via a regular antenna if that's what you mean by "terrestrially".

rt.com and their twitter are blocked.

How are you not aware of this? It's been a few years already.

The EU ruled on this.

https://paste.pics/4b60ebef97d3b7fbb6aba74637c2e818

https://paste.pics/0cb2ae98754165dad5cf086e75c4cc31

Many using VPN. For example if you set the VPN servers to HK, RT will display as usual. In general I notice my peers will use anti-west countries based servers for censored western news and the reverse for anti-east. Some do use it so intuitively they might not realized RT or any Russian sites blocked. A lot of time I just assume it is due to network outages.

I would think most people know about RT blocking because it was widely announced and discussed at the time, and not because they actually tried to access RT.

I am in the Netherlands and I am able to visit rt.com without VPN.

Netherlands here also and it's blocked for me.

Not for me.

Me too. I didn't even know about this blockade. I'm using T-Mobile fiber internet and rt.com loads just fine.

I'm in Sweden and I can see rt.com

I am very much aware of this but as I wrote, I do not consider this blocked as the servers are very much reachable and what you show is that the DNS does not resolve. That is not what I consider blocked by the state. And yes, here in Sweden, rt.com resolves just fine everywhere. That's why I was wondering about specific European legislation as it seemed to be 'only' private companies doing their part.

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