Has there been a cost-benefit analysis of what would happen if the Russian Federation were to be disconnected from the Internet?

Question

A number of the Russian industries have been cut off from being able to engage with the outside world as a result of sanctions imposed in response to Russian Federation's war of aggression against Ukraine.

The sanctions are clearly insufficient since the RF is still not considering withdrawing from the Ukrainian territory.

Russia clearly has anticipated being disconnected from the Internet while it was planning this war. It has conducted a study of how its internal processes would fare in case of a complete disconnect from the global Internet.

It is widely believed that the next round of sanctions cannot yet completely eliminate purchases of Russia's natural gas.

But what about cutting off of all Internet traffic to/from Russia? Since Russia's own disconnect from the Internet hasn't affected the natural gas deliveries, it should be possible to disconnect Russia from the global Internet without interfering with the flow of the natural gas and payments for the natural gas.

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Q: Is there any government-conducted study on the ECONOMIC IMPACT of such disconnecting (at the IP routing level, so no IP traffic in or out) of all or most of global Internet from Russia?

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Obviously all traffic cannot be stopped without stopping all telecommunications (including telephone land lines), but the aim of sanctions is never to stop all trade within a certain sphere, just most of it.

As, an example, of what such sanctions may entail, it could mean

• disconnecting all servers located geographically inside of Russia from the Internet backbone;
• mandating, by law, ICANN and RIPE NCC to invalidate Russia's IP address allocations;
• forbidding of export of any cell-phone tower equipment to the RF as well as sale of any cell-phone tower equipment, or any equipment which can be used to upgrade cell-phone tower equipment, to any entity servicing equipment on the territory of the Russian Federation.

Answer 1

Not all that sure it is possible. While Russia can choose to disconnect itself, the deliberately decentralized architecture of the internet makes the reverse not all that clearly legally or technically achievable, especially if some countries do not share the same goals.

Why We Can’t Disconnect Russia From the Internet

Authority Ceded to ICANN As a result of an effort led by the U.S., control over the internet—or rather the addressing system that largely defines the internet—has been ceded to the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, or ICANN. Although ostensibly created by world governments, ICANN is not an agency of those governments, nor is it accountable to them in any meaningful way.

and further, would it work and would it be a good idea?

“The complete opposite of what we need”

Meanwhile, other researchers joined the chorus of people opposing the Ukraine government's request. "It's the complete opposite of what we need. We should make sure that the Russian people are seeing what is happening and what their government is doing," security researcher Runa Sandvik told CyberScoop.

Sounds rather like gifting them a Great Firewall of China.

Answer 2

An administrator of the particular website can block selected country very easily. If the government will tell to block Russia, many of administrators will do. IP address cannot be hidden and always tells the country.

Most of commercial sites need working credit cards to make any business, and they can ask Google not to run they paid ads for countries where they cannot sell they products. Hence I do not think that blocking Russia would be unacceptably expensive.

There are many free but very valuable resources in the internet, like bioinformatical databases (NCBI, Ensenbl, Arabidopsis.org, PubMed Central and others), mathematical sites Wolfram alpha, free software (Apache, GitHub), scientific articles (CiteSeerX, arxiv.org), NASA space exploration (Hubble, JWST), good services that are still free (GMail, Android PlayStore).

From the other side, there are not thousands and thousands of them. I think less than a hundred sites need to be blocked to reduce the usefulness of the internet by three orders of magnitude. And many of these sites are not in Syria, North Korea or even China, but in places like USA and EU. Many are state funded so little hope they will just refuse.

Hence I think the threat is more than real and this can be done if so decided, if actively enforced or promoted by the governments of countries where the servers reside. Some particularly nasty actions from Russia, if taken, could spark voluntary initiatives between administrators.

Answer 3

I think cutting Russia off from the global internet would greatly help the Putin regime. Just look at China and North Korea, which have semi- and completely closed internets. Without something to counter the state-sponsored pro-war narrative, On-the-Fence Russians would be slowly swayed to the pro-war side, and the voice of the anti-war Russians would not be heard (both in and outside Russia). Moreover, if nobody outside Russia can hear the anti-war advocation from the Russian people, a majority of western audiences would be led--by either the lack of information or western media/government--to believe that every single Russian is pro-war. This would lead to widespread anti-Russian sentiment, which would push on-the-fence Russians to the pro-war camp. This would be a greater boon for Putin.