Starting to wonder how much the global takeoff of the Internet and specifically the WWW was due to the "end of history" period from 1989-2001, when there wasn't significant conflict between major powers. I suspect the spillover from this will be increasing Balkanisation of the Internet simply in order to limit the extent to which it's a cyberwarfare or propaganda battlefield.
> limit the extent to which it's a cyberwarfare or propaganda battlefield.
This was already done years ago by concentrating "the internet" and limiting it to a few companies with ban-hammers ready.
What once used to be many many different personal webpages, blogs, forums, chat sites (and protocols), is now basically limited to facebook (facebook, whatsapp, instagram), twitter and google (plus some outliers, such as telegram). Even with the mainstream news services, a huge percentage of people read that (MSM) news on sites like facebook and twitter (or atleast get linked from there).
Other countries have their own bundles of services (wechat in china, yandex+vk in russia, etc.)
So basically from a million different sources, pages, social groups, we've gone down to single digits per language group... and all of them can be monitored and censored by a few individuals with few agendas.
This feels more like a thing that "just happened" rather than something that was intentionally done.
Blogs and such are still there, they just take an much work as they always have. And the centralized sites don't require nearly as much intentionality.
There's been a push since 1997 at least to have gatekeepers added to the Internet.
All kinds of politicians, international and national, including Hillary Clinton (senator and Secretary of State, 3rd or 4th in line to the Presidency) have been saying for 20 years they want gatekeepers.
There were laws passed that specifically enabled consolidation and centralization.
You figure that congress and the senate "just happened" to pass those laws?
> rather than something that was intentionally done
Normal users cannot even put a link into an instagram post (pointing to whatever external site).... it seems pretty intentional to me (to keep you on their platform)
Intentionally done .. as an anti-spam measure. It's also there to limit the extent to which Instagram is part of OnlyFans customer acquisition.
As someone who lived through it, I don't think decentrafans really appreciate that we had decentralised services and spam turned them into unusable wastelands.
AI makes this worse, not better: the chance that a random site which looks like an interesting personal blog or small forum is a disguised sales op increases.
Instagram is one of those sites, where all the content you see is either content from people you actually follow (so, friends & family, and not actual spammers), or is actual spam from instagram itself (instagram ads), where links (to advertised products) are of course allowed.
So yeah... only people who'd get the onlyfans links (or whatever other non-instagram-ad spam) would be the people actually following the onlyfans "creator" (or whatever other spammer), and those probably already know the onlyfans link too.
Personal webpages and blogs still very much exist, though. I started one recently and I'm positive it gets more traffic than it would if I started it 20 years ago. I don't think censorship is the issue so much as the fact that many more people hopped on the internet and are more interested in social media than small blogs, even though they coexist.
The takeoff of the Internet was mainly because nobody was paying attention to it and it became a new frontier - literally - and was very wild-west for a time. That time is ending.
But if youre solely talking about cyber war -- ESCHELON,
CARNIVOR I mean cyber war was super deep... NSA was requiring backdoor access to all routers as early as 1995... and not only that Cerberos group bought MAE-West in San jose and PAIX in palo alto to spy on everyone... I know a lot about these spying ops.
No, I was talking about how western powers exploited and exacerbated the controversy and pain in those countries... and by western powers I am talking about the CIA mainly... [The state department]
Source, multiple family members in the state department in the past....
for reference from head of the state department at the time:
It was always a bit confusing how RIPE got around the Crimea switchover in 2014. They must have found a way to reallocate the system over to Russian companies as Ukranian ISPs no longer serve the region, but how they managed to do so without officially acknowledging Russian sovereignty is a mystery. Especially since they keep extensive paperwork.
Which would imply, since all UN countries recognize RIPE NCC as the final and exclusive authority on internet allocation matters in the European region, that the world has stopped recognizing Crimea as Ukrainian, via one degree of separation.
The reality that people don't want to admit in all these things is that the laws, etc, get pushed aside to acknowledge the "reality" in the end - might makes right and possession is 9/10ths of the law always triumphs.
And those involved often know not to push things too far when it's "working" - something like "we'll let the Russians route these IPs as long as they don't crow about routing these IPs".
This reminds me of the Chinese revolution, where after the Communists took control of everything except Taiwan, many international organizations continued to insist that Taiwan was the actual representative of China, and Taiwan held the Chinese vote at the UN until 1971. So that's about 22 years of pretending.
I'm no fan of either communism or the chinese revolution, but I always thought that was ridiculous, that a country so big as China had no UN representation except via Taiwan, and that Taiwan held a permanent member UN security council seat.
If, for example, Russia conquers all of Ukraine, then how long will some guy sitting in London keep pretending to be the Government of Ukraine? At some point, all the social media accounts, internet registries, country codes, etc -- they have to be updated to reflect reality.
The oldest one would probably be the Rada of the Belarusian Democratic Republic [1] which went into exile in 1919 and unlike similar bodies from other ex-Soviet republics remained apart after 1991.
Yes, and I understand waiting until the war ends. And even waiting for a few years after. But at some point, you do need to accept realities. The Golan Heights, for example, has Israeli registries, phone numbers, etc. If, in the future, Syria recaptures it, they can make another adjustment.
I agree with you. The GP's argument is like saying I mailed a letter addressed to "Crimea, Russia" and the post office delivered it, therefor the US (or NATO as their claim makes a few jumps) recognizes Russia's claim to Crimea.
RIPE doesn't have the authority to make that decision. Just as the friendly person at the post office making sure my letter gets where I meant it to, doesn't either.
As far as I know most countries do or at least did in fact refuse to deliver mail addressed to "Crimea, Russia". In order for it to get through, you either need someone to bounce it within Russia or to disguise it from your national post office but not from the Russian post office (no doubt this is easy: just omitting "Crimea" or using the Cyrillic alphabet would probably work).
In the same way, they refuse to accept a Russian passport issued to someone in connection with Crimea. These are not recognised as purely domestic matters; the statehood is intimately connected with the territory it controls.
Well there are a couple of contradictions, though they don't imply that Russia's claim is recognized, just that Ukraine's claim is no longer recognized.
For example, their accounting department is likely accepting money from companies that have no legal basis under Ukrainian law for activities in Crimea. Unless they've waived all fees.
All companies in the US presumably have some legal basis in US law even if not all of them are complying 100% of the time.
The equivalent situation would be if a Canadian or Mexican company simply started doing business with physical premises in Alaska or Nevada without bothering to file a single page of paperwork to any US authority.
Since this is a commonly understood difference the comment seems like it was made in bad faith.
That analogy is so bad I honestly wonder if _you're_ commenting in bad faith:
1. RIPE has basis in Ukrainian law: they supply all the IPs the Ukrainian ISPs use too.
2. You're acting like RIPE moved into Crimea after the annexation, while in reality they were operating there prior to it.
3. RIPE does not (to the best of my knowledge) have any official presence in either Ukraine or Crimea.
A better analogy would be something along the lines of "A business had customers in both the north and south US. Then, the US Civil war happened and the Union made it illegal to do business with the Confederacy. The business continued to have customers in the Union and Confederacy, in violation of US law."
This kind of absolutist thinking has little to do with reality.
One one side the situation is technically very different and might not have involved RIPE.
One the other hand just because one company does something unlawful and is in general recognized doesn't at all imply that countries changed the recognizing of boarder, like at all. Governments sometimes "accidentally overlooking" or delaying some problem is a pretty common diplomatic tool. For example most US tech companies would have had to stop providing anything involving server data storage to the EU years ago due bad interactions between GDPR and Cloud Act.
National law is not code. It's not meant to be as ridged as code. That would be an catastrophe.
Geopolitics are in some way even less ridged then national law.
I didn't activelly join the latest RIPE meeting a few days ago, for sure this was not raised in any voting which is a bit strange since the time between the meeting and when this situation started was more than enough for at least a basic voting.
But isn't this the same topic as with all other centralized (in a way services), wouldn't the same discussion apply for DNS too ?
Many things operate this way - you want to charge people who can pay but offer the service for free to those who actually cannot pay (either because of sanctions or lack of funds, etc). The tricky part is avoiding abuse; but "country claiming it is sanctioned when it is not" is pretty unlikely.
Apparently the sanctions also don't requite cutting Internet access to Russia. As long as Russia is still on the Internet we should maintain accurate records. If that means maintaining records for free, so be it.
This is akin to the fact that some US states will issue identification to people regardless of their immigration status.
IPv4 space is a super scarce resource, this is IPv4 space held by non-paying RIPE members. Why should it not be distributed among paying members, many of which are desperate for more IPv4?
It’s not like it’s impossible for Russian entities to pay either, I regularly receive payments to my European account from Russian companies.
Possibly unrelated, but: so far russia has invaded the east part of ukraine, with the west part relatively “calm” despite being of course involved in the conflict.
I wonder: has no one from the companies on the east side thought of “lending” their address blocks to companies on the west side, momentarily, in hope of ucraine to survive the hostile invasion?
A bit like asking companies on the west side to act like trustees, if you will.
There are many discussion threads at the RIPE Network Coordination Centre (NCC) Services Working Group (ncc-services-wg) mailing list with a lot of direct and ancillary information [0].
There is also a detailed factual exposition of the technical changes forced by Russia since 2014 in Crimea and later Kherson "Rerouting of Kherson follows familiar gameplan" [1].
In [3] below Viktoriia Opanasiuk writes:
"responding on «As this only affects LIRs, I doubt there will be significant participation by non-LIRs» I must say that it affects all internet service providers that use IP resources. In Ukraine there are more than 5 000 registered ISPs, but not all of them are LIRs.
The situation that we have now is that when russian troops withdraw from our territory, they dismantle and take with them not only washing machines, but also telecom equipment, TV- and radio-transmitters, leaving people who live there without any information channels and means of communication. We have to re-build telecom and internet infrastructure, and yes, we could bring new equipment there, but if the IP addresses of local Internet Providers will be transferred to other parties, we will not be able to restore even our critical infrastructure there, and there is no place to
get new IPv4 addresses.
Therefore any solutions that involve allowing transfers now and somehow reverting them later are not solving this immediate problem that we have."
The threads with most focus seem to be:
"Protecting Resource Holders in Distressed Areas" [2]
In the interest of balance this ncc-services-wg message by Max Tulyev appears to provide some background and seems to imply a possible power-play by Ukraine parliament/government people and for which no evidence of actual 'rogue' transfers are provided [0].
Although as people may have guns at their heads it would be difficult to know if a block transfer were under duress or not. It would seem possible to analyse transfers since 2014 affecting Crimea and the Donbas regions, and transfers since February 2022 affecting occupied territory.
These problems could be easily solved by moving to IPv6, but that doesn't leave any room for rent-seeking, so people would rather complain about nonsense like stealing IP addresses.
>Not "from scratch" but there are tons of routers that either don't support IPv6 or have broken support and thus need to be replaced.
A fair point. Many older (and possibly some current) consumer routers don't support IPv6 and would obviously need to be replaced.
That said, AFAICT, all the Tier I and Tier II providers and most major ISPs routing infrastructures support IPv6. Depressingly, many of those don't offer IPv6 to their customers.
This is anecdata, but my ISP (Spectrum) doesn't offer IPv6 to me (presumably based on my location), but does offer it to other customers.
And unless (this is US-centric, I know it's different elsewhere) you have an organization of a certain size[0], and most small businesses and consumers aren't anywhere near big enough, one needs to rely on their ISP for IPv6 allocations/support.
I'd add that most modern (last 10-15 years) OS implementations have IPv6 baked in, and most routers have supported dual stack for quite some time, IPv6 should be much more widely deployed in the US.
According to Google[1], less than half their users (~41%) access their services via IPv6. That's a significant increase since 2013 or so, but I suspect much of that is because India has ~80% IPv6 utilization.
All that said, I hope IPv6 adoption increases across the world in the near to medium term, and more importantly (to me at least) that my ISP starts offering it in my area.
Spectrum doesn't offer IPv6 to me, but does offer it to other customers
There's something they have to change to turn on IPv6 for your area, whether it's swapping a CMTS or updating an IPAM database or whatever, and that change costs both time and money so Spectrum is gradually rolling it out across the network. The cost of the migration is so large that it has to be spread over a decade or more so the shareholders don't revolt. It's frustrating but it's not evil (if they truly hated IPv6 they'd just never support it at all).
>There's something they have to change to turn on IPv6 for your area, whether it's swapping a CMTS or updating an IPAM database or whatever, and that change costs both time and money so Spectrum is gradually rolling it out across the network.
That's a plausible hypothesis.
Another one is that Spectrum likes the revenue it can generate from the scarcity of IPv4 addresses, especially with a captive market who can't (for the same reasons I mentioned WRT IPv6[0]) get their own IPv4 allocation.
Renting out a few million static IP addresses at $5 a pop is pure profit.
But you may well be right.
But from my perspective it's a distinction without a difference.
Suppose you are a small Ukrainian ISP working in Berdyansk or Melitopol.
In 2022 you essentially become an ISP working on Russian-held territory. Does RIPE want to just confiscate your address pool and redistribute it back in Ukraine in some form, leaving you without address space?
How does that help the people living on that territory?
The IP addresses are assigned to organizations (ISPs), not countries, so if you are the same ISP, it does not really matter which country held the territory. The article is more about risk of ukrainian ISPs on occupied territories being forced 'at gunpoint' to transfer their IP addresses to russian ISPs.
There are millions of questions like this - and at some point the small Ukrainian ISP is de facto a small Russian ISP.
Often the best thing to do in (reality, practicality) is let things continue as they were, even if technically you could cut them off entirely "as punishment to the Russians" - because it wouldn't actually punish any Russians whatsoever, but would hurt the people on the ground.
People in these territories face a life of pain any way you look at it, frankly. IP addresses are probably pretty low among their current concerns...
They're currently living in a war-torn country under Putin's iron fist. If at some point the Ukrainian army reconquer these areas, there will probably be a witch hunt if not plain ethnic cleansing. If they stay Russian, they'll live forever under the power of Putin's militias and oligarchy. Unfortunately I see no possible positive outcome for them. That's horrifying.
It may not directly help that ISP, but increasing numbers of the people living in that territory will be Russian invaders, as the Ukrainians living there are murdered or deported. And helping the invaders is problematic.
It may indirectly help that ISP or other ISPs in the future if the world makes a general policy of not supporting looting of IP addresses or anything else. If profits from looting are reduced, it may make invasions less likely, as both the rank & file and the leaders/oligarchs have less to gain. And people working at ISPs would generally benefit from their country not being invaded.
There is no such thing as a politically neutral place. Especially not for an organization that has financial ties to many other organizations around the world.
Yes, it's interesting how one finds how to be preoccupied with the plight of the poor Russians in an article literally focused on Ukrainians being forced to do things at gunpoint and how that can be blocked.
