Two Months of War: The Impact on the Internet's Core – Internet Society

The Internet shouldn’t become a battleground. The Internet Society has been saying this for years. More recently, we called upon stakeholders to make sure that the sanctions imposed on Russia as a result of its invasion of Ukraine do not impact the global Internet infrastructure.
We’re not alone. The G7 made similar declarations, stating that access to Internet infrastructure is exempt from sanctions, and companies can continue to operate in these sectors in Russia. We hope that all other nations, including all nations involved in conflict, will also implement this declaration.
The war in Ukraine raises a number of questions. How and why does the war impact the Internet? What sort of data is available that can help us understand what’s happening? Will the war have a lasting impact on the underlying fabric of the Internet?
To answer these questions, we used the data collected by organizations around the world to publish a series of blog posts on Internet Society Pulse. Here’s what we found.
Watch our timeline of events since the war started on 20 February:
20 February
Start of conflict
22 February
Anomalies increasing through Russian networks
26 February
Russia starts blocking a set of social networks
28 February-1 March
Russian networks disconnected from IXPs:
AS57629 (LLC IVI.RU), AS42861 (Foton Telecom CJSC), AS47626 (Timer, LLC)
4 March
HTTP/3 and QUIC blocking
8-15 March
Russian networks disconnected from IXPs:
AS57363 (CDNvideo LLC), AS8641 (LLC Nauka-Svyaz), AS35598 (Inetcom LLC), AS60764 (TK Telecom), AS60388 (Limited Liability Company Transneft Telecom)
19 March
Mariupol is cut off the Internet
28 March
TComm (AS8342) leaked a prefix belonging to Twitter (AS13414)
As we enter the third month of war, it is still difficult to draw any hard conclusions about the state of both the Ukrainian and Russian Internet from this data. Will the blocking of the QUIC protocol lead to  the Russian Internet’s ossification—when technology freezes in place and innovation stops?
Will the bad practice of content blocking based on route hijacks be contained to Russia. If not, what will be the effect on the global Internet? The Ukrainian Internet has shown amazing resilience so far, partly due to the Internet’s distributed architecture. Will it keep up that resilience, or will there be a tipping point where it is unable to do so? We’ll keep analyzing the data to find out.
The Internet is, among other things, an instrument for peace. Everyone, everywhere should have access, regardless of their government’s actions.
Image credit: Hans Isaacson on Unsplash
Disclaimer: Viewpoints expressed in this post are those of the author and may or may not reflect official Internet Society positions.
A little over ten years ago, using the Internet in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) wasn’t easy….
In Manipur, India, residents had to live their lives without the Internet for over seven months when they experienced…
The Internet Society and ICANN partnered to help empower IXPs in Africa to improve Internet access by making it…

source

About The Author

admin

See author's posts