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Comment by hahahahhaah | Hacker News Reader

Can ROTW sanction Iran by giving it zero internet access even to "elites" by refusing to peer.

You’re proposing a world wide agreement even by their allies? Like they can just tunnel their traffic through Russia or China.

You could try to bifurcate into allied and non allied, but even that would be flawed, especially in countries like the USA where it becomes a first amendment right to try to ban such connectivity. It’s very hard to kill the Internet in terms of connecting peers - that’s kind of the point of its design.

IPs owned by Iranian entities could be blocked straightforwardly by network operators at various levels. They could probably fudge the paperwork via Russian or Chinese entities and obfuscate the routes with cooperation from Russian/Chinese network operators, but that would take time.

they're fudging the paperwork with oil tankers that everybody can see https://www.reuters.com/graphics/IRAN-OIL/zjpqngedmvx/

They said "tunnel"

If they mean a real proxy, that’s even more involved - you can’t just do that with BGP configurations and will need someone running what is basically a country-wide VPN in Russia or China (which will probably be very identifiable).

I’m really not sure what you’re going on about. Russia and China won’t cut off Iran and will be more than happy to have them pay to connect to VPN providers in country (eg the routes advertised will only let them connect to VPN providers). Or you can use botnets to proxy your traffic for you.

Okay, but now you’re running a country-scale VPN service in Russia or whatever, and somebody has to pay for it. Or you have to acquire a botnet, again to handle the internet of a whole country. These are non-trivial barriers to overcome, and simply having transit to Russia does not solve them.

You know they can run NAT at the border right? Iran -> Russia -> the rest of the Internet. Russians would never re-advertise Iranian routes, and because they're all such good pals they could let them use whatever segment, so all Iranian traffic would simply appear as Russian traffic to the rest of the Internet, using normal residential subnets of which there are plenty. No need to ever involve the commercial VPN providers, and the scale would be negligible considering we're only talking about "the elites" of which there aren't many.

This is not as hard as you think.

But also Wireguard VPNs are also trivial to spin up and operate at scale, especially since what’s being discussed here is Internet access just for the elites which is a small fraction of the entire population. But yeah, lots and lots of ways to make this work if you don’t get everyone else to go along with your embargo.

That will make it so much easier for the regime to suppress all communication! They'll have more resources to focus on other goals, like killing all dissenters.

Is the idea to unblock their internet if they let everyone use the internet and not just the elite? It won't work. Their elites will find workarounds and they'll leave the internet completely blocked apart from that.

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