Can Russia be disconnected from the web? Two weeks ago, Ukrainian officials asked the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (also know as ICANN) to revoke specific country code top-level domains operated from within Russia.
ICANN responded saying that, apart from the technical perspective, it won’t revoke specific country code top-level domains since ICANN’s mission is to “maintain neutrality and act in support of the global Internet.”
So while ICANN won't disconnect Russia from the web, there has been speculation that Russia itself might slowly ‘disconnect’ from the web. Bloomberg has written an extensive article on Russia’s Internet isolation.
Because of this speculation, we're monitoring all unique .ru top-level domains. As you can see in the graph, we have an overview of all .ru domains and the countries that they’re hosted in. If Russia is slowly isolating the Russian Internet from the rest of the world, we’ll start seeing fewer domains with an available response (meaning websites we could actually find).
Right now, most .ru domains are still available from outside Russia. So although Russia has restricted access to western websites, we don't see any clear trend the other way round yet. We’ll keep monitoring domains in Russia and .ru domains in the coming months.
