End of the Dream

by Sean Haas

As I'm sitting here in my office, the Russian invasion of Ukraine is ongoing.

I'm half a world away, tucked in the fold of some undisclosed state.  Despite that seeming isolation, I still have a connection to the conflict.  I have a friend, a journalist we'll call K, who just got into Odessa.

He's based out of eastern Europe and has been trying to get into Ukraine since the war started.  He finally made it after a month and some change.  K has been keeping up daily reporting about the war, his travels, and where he gets his information from.  Since the conflict started, I've been noticing a pattern, something gnawing away at me.  I think it's something I should have noticed earlier.  The dream of the Internet is ending.

The biggest triumph of the Internet has been its ability to connect the world.  Some locales may only have limited bandwidth, but there are few places the Internet hasn't at least touched.  The free and rapid flow of information has fundamentally changed the state of the world.  This hasn't been a slow change, or some shift in irrelevant policy.  I'm talking about change that has occurred in our lifetime, change that affects most of us personally.

I remember struggling with a dial-up modem back in the day.  I'd check my email every few days, maybe download a file or two overnight when no one was hogging the phone.  Now I'm constantly connected to some networked something.  Information flows right into my fingertips.  Many of my friends I've never met face to face, but I can keep in touch with them as if they were sitting right here in my office.

The roots of the Internet are fundamentally militant and aggressive (look up Paul Baran's report on distributed networks if you want to feel some spook energy), but as the ARPANET matured it transmuted into something fundamentally different.  The modern Internet is, by and large, a productive force that's made the world a smaller place.  However, that maybe approaching an end.  What if the Internet no longer touched everywhere the Sun shines?  What if the free flow of information ran into a roadblock?

I don't think that you necessarily need to look at all sides equally when covering a conflict.  People often lie, governments always have agendas, even something as mundane as the media that carries a message can color its content.  Combat footage played over a radio show loses something in translation.  However, I think it's always worth a few brain cells to look at what both sides are arguing.  Sun Tzu said something to the effect of: "Know your enemy and know yourself."  Well, we mostly know ourselves, so information gathering is often an exercise in knowing the enemy.  That includes knowing how the enemy presents itself to its citizens.

K and I are on the same page when it comes to this.  The media lies, some media lies more than others, but it's still important to take a look.  Know your enemy, know their lies, and know how they want to be seen.  To that end, K often reports on Russian state media.  It's all part of the blend that makes for good journalism.  At the beginning of March, the European Commission announced moves to block content from Russia Today and Sputnik.  Maybe that's a good move, maybe it's not - I'm not here to argue either way.  But it makes it a little harder to know your enemy.

The E.U. is using interesting tools to restrict this flow of information.  The Commission is working with large tech companies to stop the spread of selected Russian news sources within the E.U.  They are using a legal framework to pressure private entities.  In most cases, these entities, mainly social networks, are based outside of Europe.  These are American companies that happen to do business within the E.U.'s borders.  To keep operating in that locale, you have to play by the rules.

The Kremlin has started enforcing similar policies.  In the same timeframe, sites such as Facebook and Twitter have been blocked within Russia.  The tools used here are different than in the west.  Reporting makes it sound like these sites are blocked lower down on the network stack.  In Russia this was done via, once again, legal actions.  The intent of the E.U. and the Kremlin here is in unison: they both seek to control the free flow of information.

This is only the surface level of the story.  Russia is also being disconnected on the infrastructure level.  At least Lumen and Cogent have severed connections to the country.  Lumen specifically is a possibly dangerous case.  They are a Tier 1 ISP; that's one of the components that people reference when they talk about the "backbone" of the Internet.  A single Tier 1 pulling out of Russia will probably just mean worse bandwidth, annoying but not an immediate disaster.  What happens if more providers follow suit?  What if there is political pressure at home to cease dealings with Russia?  What if new laws within that country make it either dangerous or no longer profitable to operate there?

We can complicate the picture.  There are 15 Tier 1 providers.  These providers are based out of the United States, the U.K., Sweden, Spain, Japan, Italy, India, Hong Kong, Germany, and France (note that most of these are NATO countries).  The reason these providers matter is that their networks can access any IP address in the world, at least in theory.  If you have a hook into one, then you are tied right into the information superhighway.  Theoretically, if a regime were to alienate all those countries, then they could be totally isolated from the Internet.

We have yet to see a situation where a country is totally cut off from the Internet for an indefinite period of time.  It seems that once the Internet arrives, it's there to stay.  I'd guess the network is just too handy for governments to totally pull the plug, or it's proven too profitable to those who back regimes.  That said, there are some nations that approach digital isolation.

The canonical example is always China and the so-called Great Firewall.  It's well known that the Chinese government has gone to great lengths to restrict the flow of information in and out of the country.  This ranges from censorship on government-regulated platforms to fully blocking certain services.  All backed up by laws and regulations, of course.  But even this firewall is surprisingly porous.

PCCW Global, a Tier 1 provider headquartered in Hong Kong, retains connections with mainland China.  There's one backbone right there.  Foreign operators can drop servers in China - it's just a bit of a process.  About ten years ago, one of my coworkers spent a few months trying to get some servers co-located in China.  They eventually gave up on the idea.  At the time, it was just too expensive to justify, but it is possible.  So while the Internet in China may look different, there is still a flow of information.  There are broad swathes of the network that will still look the same.

Even a pariah state like North Korea is hooked into the World Wide Web, at least in theory.  Access is severely restricted in-country, but they do have service providers that connect up to larger networks in China and Russia.  Those, in turn, eventually find their way up to Tier 1 providers.

Practice is a different matter.  North Korea actually offers a taste of where we might be headed.  Internet access isn't just censored, it's hard to come by.  Certain government agencies, schools, and research centers have a link to the outside world.  For everyone else, there's Kwangmyong: North Korea's own intranet.  This is a network isolated from the rest of the world.  The technical details aren't entirely forthcoming, as one can imagine.  It sounds like Kwangmyong is air-gapped, or otherwise physically isolated from the good fiber of the wider world.  It also appears to use the same protocols as the normal Internet.  Everything is just in miniature, fully controlled by the North Korean government.

A network like this offers some distinct advantages to a regime.  The reduction in scale makes censorship much easier.  While systems like email and chat rooms supposedly exist inside this network, they operate on a smaller scale.  Fewer users means fewer eyes are needed to track their movement.  Total isolation ensures that your nice network can't be used as a vector for the wrong kind of ideas.  No bad news comes in, no bad news goes out, and no international actors can compromise your network.  Imagine the savings in security alone!

Someone connected to the Kwangmyong isn't just looking at some limited set of the overall Internet.  They aren't connected to the Internet at all.  Their networked world isn't made smaller, it just is small.  So what happens if North Korea decides to invade South Korea?  Let's say a journalist is trying to report on the conflict.  How do you know your enemy if you can't even read their domestic news?  How do you get sources on the ground if no one on the ground can shoot you an email?  It's not that there's no information, there's just no flow.

We may be heading towards a wider adoption of the Kwangmyong approach.  A nation wouldn't even have to be a pariah state to pull the plug on the Internet.  North Korea has allocated IP addresses - they can route to the rest of the world.  They've just chosen to isolate the vast majority of their network.  This is, no doubt, partly due to internal political pressures and partly due to external pressures.

I think it's at least possible for a similar system to be implemented in any nation in the world.  Cuba has a similar system in place; a connection to the Internet for a select few users, and government-controlled intranet for the balance.  Myanmar has, at some points, maintained their own national intranet.  In 2011, Iran announced their intention to develop a similar intranet.

We can also add Russia to this "maybe" list.  In 2019, a slate of laws, sometimes called the Sovereign Internet laws, were passed.  According to the State Duma these laws mandate the creation of a "national Internet traffic routing system" (duma.gov.ru/news/44551).  This system can serve as a centralized means of censorship and tracking.  It can just as easily serve as a choke point to switch Russia from the Internet to its very own intranet.

At what point does the balance of financial and political pressure cause that switch to be flipped?  I think we might find out soon.

Where does that leave the Internet?

Maybe it sees a downgrade, maybe it drops the big I.  The death of the Internet may be even closer than we think.  PRISM and similar projects administered by the U.S. government are already able to track Internet traffic.  That takes some serious hardware and some serious access.

It takes arrangements similar to those set up in Russia.  I'd argue that the feds already have the technical ability to cut America's network off from the wider world.  Can we truly consider the Internet free if that ability exists?  Can the dream of the Internet come true while political actors can control its fate?

I, for one, am savoring each packet I receive.