Internet Sanctions on Russian Media: Actions and Effects

As a response to the Russian aggression against Ukraine, the European Union (EU), through the notion of "digital sovereignty", imposed sanctions on organizations and individuals affiliated with the Russian Federation that prohibit broadcasting content, including online distribution. In this paper, we interrogate the implementation of these sanctions and interpret them as a means to translate the union of states' governmental edicts into effective technical countermeasures. Through longitudinal traffic analysis, we construct an understanding of how ISPs in different EU countries attempted to enforce these sanctions, and compare these implementations to similar measures in other western countries. We find a wide variation of blocking coverage, both internationally and within individual member states. We draw the conclusion that digital sovereignty through sanctions in the EU has a concrete but distinctly limited impact on information flows.Comment: Accepted to Free and Open Communications on the Internet (FOCI) 202

Internet Sanctions on Russian Media:Actions and Effects

As a response to the Russian aggression against Ukraine, the European Union (EU), through the notion of ‘digital sovereignty,’ imposed sanctions on organizations and individuals affiliated with the Russian Federation that prohibit broadcasting content, including online distribution. In this paper, we interrogate the implementation of these sanctions and interpret them as a means to translate the union of states’ governmental edicts into effective technical countermeasures. Through longitudinal traffic analysis, we construct an understanding of how ISPs in different EU countries attempted to enforce these sanctions, and compare these implementations to similar measures in other western countries. We find a wide variation of blocking coverage, both internationally and within individual member states. We draw the conclusion that digital sovereignty through sanctions in the EU has a concrete but distinctly limitedimpact on information flows

How India Censors the Web

One of the primary ways in which India engages in online censorship is by ordering Internet Service Providers (ISPs) operating in its jurisdiction to block access to certain websites for its users. This paper reports the different techniques Indian ISPs are using to censor websites, and investigates whether website blocklists are consistent across ISPs. We propose a suite of tests that prove more robust than previous work in detecting DNS and HTTP based censorship. Our tests also discern the use of SNI inspection for blocking websites, which is previously undocumented in the Indian context. Using information from court orders, user reports, and public and leaked government orders, we compile the largest known list of potentially blocked websites in India. We pass this list to our tests and run them from connections of six different ISPs, which together serve more than 98% of Internet users in India. Our findings not only confirm that ISPs are using different techniques to block websites, but also demonstrate that different ISPs are not blocking the same websites

Internet measurements and policy

Ideally telecommunications policy decisions would be based on easily understandable data collected by several, federated, independent, open-source network measurement tools based on documented methodologies. In reality, most measurement tools are fragmented to such an extent that their data are limited in comparability and not immediately accessible to inform policy. This paper tries to understand how we could improve the current situation. We describe how successful internet measurement tools managed to foster their adoption by users. We argue that cooperation is the key to reduce the burden on individual project maintainers and we model factors reducing incentives to cooperate. We set forth an agenda for increasing cooperation and we provide examples of cooperation between projects