Russian Twitter users noticed something strange when they tried to access the service on March 4: They couldn’t. For the previous six days, anyone trying to access Twitter from Russia noticed internet speeds slowing to a crawl, no matter how fast their connection was. Then came the eclipse.
Twitter going offline showed how seriously the Russian state has taken the role of social media in fueling dissent over the country’s invasion of Ukraine. And it demonstrates Russia’s progress in creating a “splinternet,” a move that will effectively cut the country off from the rest of the world’s Internet infrastructure. Such a move would allow Russia to more tightly control the talks and stifle dissent — and that’s getting closer by the day.
The gold standard of digital walled gardens is China, which has managed to separate itself from the rest of the digital world with great success – although people are still finding their way around the Great Firewall. “I think they’re going to aspire to [mimic China]Doug Madery of Kentik, a San Francisco-based Internet monitoring company, says of Russia. “But it wasn’t easy for the Chinese.” China put vast numbers of technical experts to work on its version of the Internet and spent huge sums of money. Until 2001 The International Center for Human Rights and Democratic Development estimates that China spends $20 billion on censoring telecommunications equipment each year. The famous Great Firewall is just that: a firewall that inspects every bit of traffic entering Chinese cyberspace and compares it to a block list. Most of the internet traffic to China passes through three chokepoints that block any unwanted content. Copying China’s approach in Russia is something Maddary says may be beyond Russian President Vladimir Putin’s reach. “I don’t think Russia has invested that kind of energy in engineering resources to reproduce it,” Maddery says. “There are quite a few countries that would love to have what China has, but they just can’t.” They don’t have people to do it. It has a ways to go before Russia becomes like China.
Even if Russia had the people, putting barriers in a relatively open Internet infrastructure built over decades is far from easy. Controlling a country’s Internet requires two main components: isolation from the rest of the world and cutting off access from within. “There’s a lot going on on both sides of the ledger,” says Madori. But both are more difficult for Russia than China because it is starting from a relatively open Internet, after years of engagement with the West. (China, by contrast, has been closed almost since the first people got on the Internet, following a February 1996 order that gave the state absolute control over its design and established a ban on “incitement to overthrow the government or the socialist system”—meaning , that it was insular by design.)
Russia’s Internet regulator, Roskomnadzor, can legally require Russian Internet Service Providers (ISPs) to block content or not fulfill traffic requests. They can redirect Internet traffic away from sites that Roskomnadzor deems inappropriate for ordinary Russians, essentially cutting off each individual browser from the rest of the world. However, Russia has more than 3,000 ISPs that implement different speed dictates. “Everyone is left to their own devices to figure out how to comply with a government order to block the BBC or something like that,” Maddery says. Each ISP also uses different methods to try to block access to websites that Russia’s media regulator says are banned, with varying degrees of success. “Depending on the technique they adopt, getting around the block can be easier or harder,” says Maria Xinou of the Internet censorship nonprofit Open Observatory of Network Interference (OONI).
Most often, Russian ISPs reset user connections while trying to access websites, leaving them trapped in a frustrating cycle of failed requests. This happens by effectively hijacking a request from a web browser to access a website. “By resetting your connection, they prevent you from connecting to the desired website or service,” says Xynou. There are other blocking techniques used by Russia. One stops TLS connections, the cryptographic mechanism that governs most Internet connections, which in turn blocks access to specific websites. Another method involves delivering block notices to users who try to access a website by manipulating the Domain Name System, or DNS, which is essentially the Internet’s phone book. If the browser does not have access to this phone book, it cannot load a website.
The system may work, but it has its drawbacks. “When censorship is so decentralized, it really means that it ends up being much less effective than if it was implemented in a centralized way,” says Xynou. Russia has taken some steps to try to remedy this, but has struggled in recent history to impose national blocks or bars on websites deemed objectionable. This is due to the way the Russian internet infrastructure works.
“Russia’s Internet ecosystem is poorly embedded in the global one,” said Alena Epifanova, a research fellow at the German Council on Foreign Relations, a foreign policy nonprofit that has studied Russia’s Internet censorship and infrastructure. “We see a lot of foreign companies involved in managing their infrastructure, from telecommunications to data delivery networks.” That includes Nokia, whose hardware reportedly powers SORM, Russia’s massive social media spying operation.
