Sovereignty

When a regime has finished with the newspapers and the television studios, there is always one frontier left, and for the Russian state that frontier is now the internet itself. The old press was strangled long ago; the last registered liberal outlets were blocked in the first week of the full-scale war, and the editors were given the standard choice between prison and silence. But none of that reached the place where most people had quietly gone to find out what was actually happening — the open net, with its three stubborn nests of independent information: Wikipedia, Telegram, and, above all, YouTube. The campaign against these is not a continuation of the old censorship by other means. It is a qualitatively new project: not to bend the platforms but to wall the country off from them, to sever an entire population from the global information space and seal it inside a managed enclosure. This is the digital iron curtain, and it is being lowered in plain sight. ...