Nobody's saying the government shouldn't be able to go after the owner of the site and force them to shut it down. It definitely shouldn't be done by third parties though.
- Domain Name Seizures via ICANN and registrars
- Political/legal pressure on CDNs, SSL certificate providers, bandwidth providers.
- Propaganda and legal labeling ("malicious actor", "foreign agent", "terrorist")
- There are technical workarounds to keep the page up within Russia's sovereign internet (Runet).
> This blocking regulation requires network providers, including CDNs, to comply with blocking notices within 30 minutes.
> orders that go beyond regular Internet providers, requiring DNS resolvers and VPN services to take action as well.
Or tap the fiber lines at the border and inject RST packets from off-path, which is something the Great Firewall of China does, and is ironically much more transparent than what they actually are doing.
Or cut the cables between the USA and Russia, or between the USA and any country that doesn't cut their own cables to Russia. The USA did this to Iran with the banking system and it worked: the USA cuts money transfers with any country that doesn't cut money transfers with Iran. I don't think it would necessarily go their way if they did it right now with the internet.
It does, however, provide evidence that doing that is dumb.
KYC/AML have an effectiveness that rounds to zero while causing trouble for innocent people as the government pressures the banks to do something about problems the banks aren't in a position to actually solve, so instead the banks suspend the accounts of more innocent people because the government is pressuring them to suspend more accounts.
That's factually inaccurate.
It isn't:
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/25741292.2020.1...
"It finds that the anti-money laundering policy intervention has less than 0.1 percent impact on criminal finances, compliance costs exceed recovered criminal funds more than a hundred times over, and banks, taxpayers and ordinary citizens are penalized more than criminal enterprises."