of bandwidth, said Doug Madory, director of
internet analysis for the network management
firm Kentik. He has noted no appreciable drop in
connectivity from outside providers.
Cloudflare continues to operate four data centers
in Russia even though Russian authorities
ordered government websites to drop foreign-
owned hosting providers. In a March 7 blog post
the company said it had determined “Russia
needs more Internet access, not less.”
Under a 2019 “sovereign internet” law, Russia
is supposed to be able to operate its internet
independent of the rest of the world. In practice,
that has brought Russia closer to the kind of
intensive internet monitoring and control
practiced by China and Iran.
Its telecommunications oversight agency,
Rozkomnadzor, successfully tested the system
at scale a year ago when it throttled access
to Twitter. It uses hundreds of so-called
middleboxes — router-like devices run and
remotely controlled by bureaucrats that can
block individual websites and services —
installed by law at all internet providers
inside Russia.
But the system, which also lets the FSB security
service spy on Russian citizens, is a relative sieve
compared to China’s Great Firewall. Andrew
Sullivan, president of the nonprofit Internet
Society, said there’s no evidence it has the ability
to successfully disconnect Russia from the
wider internet.
“Walling off a country’s internet is complicated,
culturally, economically and technologically. And
it becomes far more complicated with a country
like Russia, whose internet, unlike China’s, was not