Russians Are Stuck in Putin's Web

○ A long-planned break from the Western internet has become more real than ever

- Jillian Deutsch and Ivan Levingston, with Lyubov Pronina

The Russian internet began shrinking rapidly when the country’s troops poured across Ukraine’s border in February. First Facebook and Twitter got slower, then the government blocked them entirely. TikTok is now restricting service, and Apple, Dell, Microsoft, and Oracle are curtailing operations. Russian internet users can no longer count on being able to use Amazon’s or Netflix’s streaming video platforms, web-enabled services such as Airbnb, or payment networks like Visa and Mastercard.

The shutdowns—some imposed by the Russian government, others by foreign-based corporations— are unlikely to ease up soon. “Now every day something new is being shut down,” says Anastasia Ermolaeva, a teacher in Moscow. “I’m worried a lot about being completely cut off from the rest of the global internet.”

Experts have warned for years about the fracturing of the global internet into national networks controlled by their governments, and some see sweeping—and potentially permanent— consequences to Russia’s crackdown. “It is very likely and possible that we just have reached a tipping point in the Balkanization of the global internet,” says Asma Mhalla, a lecturer on the digital economy at research university Sciences Po in Paris.

The prime example of this dynamic so far has been China. Beijing has spent years creating a tightly controlled local internet, where the government has tools to regulate information flows— and where local tech services such as Weibo and WeChat stand-in for U.S. tech products popular in many other countries.