December 2024 Russia blocked residents in Dagestan, Chechnya, and Ingushetia from outside internet access for a weekend, testing their sovereign internet. It was extremely successful restricting almost all VPN access as well. Shortly after, Russia shrunk their internet footprint to less than that of Turkey or Poland. That works out to about 29% of what Canada shows and only 4% of America’s exposure despite being the 9th largest population. Rather tell tale.
Many consider such actions to be those of dictatorship regimes yet all Internet Service Providers use some form of control and monitoring to enable them to “comply” with regulations in the countries they serve. The technology used in either case is just as powerful and invasive allowing for on the fly conversion, manipulation, insertion, and out right denial of whatever traffic is deemed to be the problem of the day. The only difference is the level and type of control exerted.
The assumption is that democratic countries are somehow free when it comes to internet content, but most have no idea how much is manipulated or controlled. Worse is that the world wide web is very susceptible by virtue of domain names and their dependent lookup against a handful of sources. Sites can easily be redirected or removed simply by altering DNS records. Domain take downs are common and have been done for various legal reasons but that is not the only type of manipulation vulnerability. Everything from stolen DNS to spoofed DNS has occurred producing similar results.
It should be relatively obvious how fragile this infrastructure is yet most assume everything to be well and good. How envious many of the former dictators of the world would be of what could very well be one the largest propaganda resources ever created. Already it is difficult to discern between truth and fiction on the internet, but imagine how it could be used to manipulate on a global scale – something never before possible. It isn’t that far fetched. There may be over 1500 top level domains but only a handful that people use and trust such as the dot com. Owners of the popular top level domains are few making it relatively easy to effect change.
DNS isn’t the only area of concern. Search engines and the lack of variety make for another easy source of manipulation. Many are adopting some form of AI to assist in generating results but recent discoveries show AI to be just as manipulative as their human creators. Some have been caught cheating in chess games, others provide completely misleading and outright wrong information, while still others generate fake or severely biased information. These are problems which are only going to make the discovery of truth that much more difficult.
Reality is Russia isn’t the only country playing games with the internet and it’s content. Almost every country is doing the same on some level while major corporations that control key aspects of the internet do the same. What was once considered a bright future for information exchange has become a cesspool of dribble controlled by wealth and it’s generated power. Critical thinking has never been more required but even that has been manipulated by the education system to remove independent thought. To quote Tom Cochrane, “It’s a mad mad world, shake your hands and say good luck”.