Explained: How Russia-Ukraine war threatens to sabotage integrity of global internet

Russian internet users have experienced what has been called the "decline of a digital iron curtain" since the commencement of Russia's war on Ukraine in late February 2022. The Russian government blocked all significant opposition news websites, including Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.

Internet users have been subject to administrative and criminal prosecution for allegedly propagating online misinformation about Russia's operations in Ukraine under the new harsh legislation intended to combat fake news regarding the Russian-Ukrainian war. As part of the enormous economic flight from the country, most Western technology companies, from Airbnb to Apple, have discontinued or reduced their activities in Russia.

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In the early weeks of the conflict, many Russians downloaded virtual private network software to access services and websites that were prohibited. By the end of April, 23% of Russian internet users said they occasionally used VPNs. To stop people from getting around government censorship, the official media authority Roskomnadzor has started blocking VPNs since June 2022.

Although the speed and scope of the wartime internet crackdown are unprecedented, the legal, technical, and rhetorical groundwork for it was established during the previous decade under the banner of digital sovereignty.

The exercise of state control over digital processes such as the transmission of data and content online, the collection of personal information, and the development of digital technology is known as "digital sovereignty" for states. Digital sovereignty frequently acts as a cover for stifling internal opposition under authoritarian governments like the one in modern-day Russia.

Digital sovereignty pioneer

Since the early 1990s, Russia has promoted maintaining state control over information and telecommunications. A debilitated Russia could not compete with the US economically, technologically, or militarily after the Cold War. Instead, Russian officials aimed to preserve their country's great power position by limiting the burgeoning US worldwide dominance.

They achieved this by advocating for the supremacy of state sovereignty as a guiding principle of global governance. In the 2000s, Moscow teamed up with Beijing to lead the international campaign for internet sovereignty to showcase its great power renaissance.

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The Kremlin has long advocated for digital sovereignty on a global scale, but it wasn't until the early 2010s that it started to assert state control over its internal cyberspace. Russia had the most anti-government protests in its post-Soviet history from late 2011 to mid-2012 in opposition to Vladimir Putin's third presidential bid and rigged parliamentary elections. The internet played a crucial role in organising and coordinating the Russian protests, just like during the Arab Spring revolutions against authoritarian governments in the Middle East.

After Putin's reelection as president in March 2012, the Kremlin focused on governing Russian online. Under the pretence of combating child pornography, suicide, extremism, and other generally known societal evils, the so-called Blacklist Law developed a framework for censoring websites.

However, the rule has frequently been applied to forbid media and activist websites for the opposition. The so-called Blogger's Law then made all websites and social media accounts with more than 3,000 daily users subject to state registration and traditional media rules.

Immediately following Russia's invasion of eastern Ukraine in the spring of 2014, Moscow's embrace of authoritarian digital sovereignty reached its next critical point. The Russian government launched a flurry of projects over the next five years as relations with the West deteriorated to maintain control over the nation's increasingly networked populace.

For instance, the data localisation law mandated that international technology companies store Russian people's data on servers inside the nation, where it would be simple for the authorities to access them. Another law mandated that telecom and internet providers keep users' communications for six months and their metadata for three years, respectively, and pass them over to authorities upon request without a court order, all under the guise of combating terrorism.

The Kremlin has utilised these and other legal breakthroughs to file criminal charges against thousands of internet users and imprison hundreds of people for liking and sharing anti-government social media information.

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The Sovereign Internet Law

With the so-called Sovereign Internet Law, the Russian government expanded upon its goals of digital sovereignty in April 2019. The law made it easier to take advantage of certain people while isolating the entire online community.

All internet service providers are required by law to set up government-mandated defences against outside threats to the stability, security, and operational integrity of the internet within Russian borders. The Russian government has extensively interpreted threats, including material on social media.

For instance, when Twitter refused to remove illegal content as requested by the government, the authorities frequently exploited this law to limit Twitter's performance on mobile devices.

The bill also provides standards for managing all internet traffic through a single command centre and rerouting it through Russian territory. Ironically, given the lack of Russian equivalents, the Moscow-based centre that now regulates traffic and combats international circumvention tools like the Tor browser needs Chinese and US gear and software to operate.

Last but not least, the bill commits to creating a national Domain Name System for Russia. The primary database for the entire internet, DNS, is used to translate between domain names like theconversation.com and their IP addresses, in this example, 151.101.2.133. The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, a nonprofit organisation with headquarters in California, manages DNS.

Putin defended the national DNS when the law was passed by claiming that it would enable the Russian internet section to continue operating even if ICANN cut off Russia from the global internet in retaliation. In reality, ICANN refused the Ukrainian government's request to disconnect Russia from the DNS days after Russia invaded that country in February 2022. Officials from ICANN stated that they did not want to create the precedent of cutting out entire nations for political reasons.

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Splitting the global internet

Both Russia's activities and those of technology corporations in the West during the Russian-Ukrainian war have compromised the integrity of the world wide web. Social media sites have blocked access to Russian state media in an unprecedented step.

A global network of networks makes up the internet. The fundamental tenet of the internet is the interoperability of these networks. The reality of the world's linguistic and cultural variety has, of course, always clashed with the dream of a single internet: Unsurprisingly, most consumers don't demand content from distant countries in obscure languages. However, governmental constraints threaten to splinter the internet into disparate networks further.

Though it may not be fought over on the battlefield, global interconnectivity has become one of the values at stake in the Russian-Ukrainian war. And as Russia has solidified its control over sections of eastern Ukraine, it has moved the digital Iron Curtain to those frontiers.

(With inputs from PTI)