Note: we used a new map tool that automatically draws borders around countries and I was too busy figuring out how it works to pay attention to the all the details, like Crimea being marked as Russia in it. This is an error on my half, not some conscious statement, so feel free to ignore those and focus on the rest of the details. Also, get 20% off that Brilliant subscription: brilliant.org/techaltar

This is extremely depressing. Every country that wants to cut itself off is basically admitting that it desperately wants to surpress its people. I hope there will always be some workarounds

As an Ethiopian, i can tell you that the 18 month long internet blackout is misleading, the blackout is only in a small region (state/ province) where, up until recently, there has been a violent war between the federal government and a heavily armed rebels. Electricity and running water have also been cut there , partly as a deliberate act of sabotage by both sides and partly due to infrastructure damage resulting from shelling. Things might come back to normal pretty soon tho, the rebels have agreed to a ceasefire and disarmament.

We can all thank Cisco with building China’s Great Firewall. I hope everyone remembers this.

Mike Pondsmith the creator of the Cyberpunk franchise predicted this outcome in the early 90's, He called the local networks "Data fortress" but those where mainly controlled by megacorporations not nation/states.

Let me explain the system in Iran, most people get it wrong. In the normal times there is a black list where users are not allowed to access certain hosts. In the times of protests and unrest they move to a white list system where only Iranian IPs are accessible so it's not just certain services but all services that are hosted in Iran. The white list is only applied to the network of normal Iranians so the servers and the hosts inside Iran still work on the black list system because it is necessary to acceess services that are not hosted inside Iran by them. So you can bypass the internet by getting a server inside Iran and a server outside Iran then you can use various tools like squid, shadowsocks, v2ray, and etc. and a tunnel between the two servers to bypass the national internet. Edit: of course users are still subjected to package checking like it was explained in the video if your VPN doesn't have obfuscation feature then the ISPs will find out that you are using a VPN as it is very easy without obfuscation and block your connection. I recommend using RSA with any service that you use and performing a deffie-hellman on all connections. Basically a TLS. The last method if everything else was unable is to use ssh to forward the VPN or the proxy port to your localhost and then connect to it.

5:10 I'm from Russia, I use internet daily from 2007, there was never a complete 'black-out' in our country, only sites banning and black lists.

Monitoring here in Australia, some protests had our government investigate protest organises. It has been happening all over the world.

For China, on a trip I had in inner Mongolia pre-covid, I was able to watch UKposts/FB/Netflix just on China Telecom, merely because I purchased a 8GB data sim card from Hong Kong, and the firewall was completely bypassed without a VPN. I remember that it felt surreal that I was literally in the middle of nowhere in grassfields, yet I had a consistently strong 4G signal on the road, and was enjoying UKposts as if I was in the middle of a city.

maybe it is not ‘global’ internet, but American internet from the beginning, and now people just realized how dangerous this can be.

Not only cutting internet but also censoring it to massive levels, many might have seen how internet has gotten really small.

It has never been “global” in the decentralization sense. Countries like China left the “global” internet, because it’s predominantly controlled by the United States. Social media is one of the examples to show why the decoupling is necessary. Then, the US is doing the same, for a similar reason. The US no longer has complete control over the dissemination of information. Fearing that the narratives go against their own, the US is also decoupling.

This feels like we're entering a second cold war, a world divided in two

Makes me wonder if the global Internet was just a beautiful dream that was doomed from the start. 😞

You forgot S Korea inadvertently cutting itself off by charging foreign (and domestic) companies bandwidth traffic fees. The politicians here might actually be dumber than Americans.😂

When it comes to avoiding Twitter users, one needs to self censor their own internet.

My country Swaziland 🇸🇿 making the list for all the wrong reasons of shutting down the internet and committing atrocious acts of violence during the 3-day internet shutdown in 2021. That dark period taught us the goodness of having a VPN. Even to this day I always make sure that my VPN is on. I suffered some form of depression because of being cutoff the global internet. ☹️😰🥺 #Internetshutdown. Thanks for this informative research bro.

Next video on the topic you should talk about what does it mean for international shared resources and standards on the internet, stuff like IP address allocation, domain names and certificate authorities.

This is depressing, it shows that we never got away from the "a small group of people doing stuff convenient to them and treating others like ants" system

Amazing video, Got to say this is a real relevant global commentary! Thank you

I hope there is always enough demand for access to random things, that the trick of encrypting information yourself will continue to work. Steganography is a great way to bypass filters when encryption wouldn't work.

One thing worth stressing is that the general political atmosphere can have a big impact on how ISPs implement filters. For example, when the UK ISP I work for was told to start blocking certain Russian news websites, we took the position that we would not do so as we did not implement our own DNS. Would we have done so if we lived in the sort of place where people get bundled into unmarked vans and never seen again - somehow I doubt it.

Amazing research on this topic! Thanks for posting

Very informative video, I like your narrative style. Could you please take the same point you discussed here and applied them to Starlink? What would the government do if Starlink is operating

It was inevitable, once countries began making laws for internet. Why should India follow EU's laws or Russia follow Indian laws or US follow Chinese laws... They are sovereign countries.

That was one nice thumbnail you made! (It may look a bit generic, but a big BIG improvement from your thumbnails from 2 years ago)

At that point, the definition of whose internet is the global internet will also change

The one thing that I find quite underdiscussed is the underlying technologies. TCP/IP doesn't really care what acts as a backhaul (copper, fibre optics, radio), basically anything which can be modulated can wrap IP packets. Look to things in the amateur radio scene like DX, Earth-Moon-Earth comms, Winlink, RTTY, APRS, Packet Radio et al. Unless a state-based actor can jam literally GHz of spectrum, A form of the "internet" will prevail

Ohh I really like this video. Great content for the masses. Excellent job at capturing what makes videos great.

This is... Really sad and dystopian...

Thanks for this Information. Isolation is definetly increasing, not only for the Internet :(

My Company uses a Proxy in each factory and the factories are connected via MPLS. Some employee from China figured out the IP from our Proxy in Europe and surfed on the Web via the european proxy. He/She searched for the wrong thing and our MPLS was cut within minutes in China citing "technical error".

About the 100+ regional blackouts in India, this has truly been a messed up time, but those blackouts were pretty localised and the goal was to completely deny internet access for the region temporarily (few days) rather than create an iron curtain like China. What's more messed up is the lessons India's learned from others, now the govt is planning to order all VPN services on Indian soil to hand over their data pertaining to traffic in the country. Not sure if that's come to pass yet but this is not a good time. Canada's Bill C-11 is also the kind of idea leaders here would love and dying TV giants would lobby for.

Very informative video 👍

I have to disagree with you on the "load by default" method on foreign websites. Back in 2006, i were in Canton (Guangzhou), China, at the trade fair. In our hotel room, i tried to access our small website which were timed out. Tried to access several times, without success, but after 10-15 minutes, like a magic wand did hit it, started to work quick and flawlessly. I FELT (as a programmer) that someone actually clicked on the "approved" button after checking out our site.

Thanks for your sharing

It's the era of information warfare... Protecting your own self is not bad.

it is kinda depressing to realize that the golden age of the internet is over (i think it ended somewhere between 2013 and 2017

When it comes to India, sometimes things are said without context or blanket general statements are made as if the whole country experienced blackouts - people fail to mention that only some specific regions experiencd it because the internet messaging apps and social media were being actively used to spread misinformation leading to violence. Also, rich countries like the US etc have much more sophisticated methods to control the internet and media in general. Hope people have heard of the Snowden revelations.

Hi TechAltar long time subscriber here. Talking about blackouts you showed on the map that Russia used them. I don’t recall statewide blackouts ever happening. Quick googling didn’t help me find sources. Did that really happen?

Thank you for talking about Iran. Protests are on going in Iran and it's very hard to connect to the Internet.

Your mention of India is misleading. Blackouts in India were limited to a city or two at a time for 4G internet on mobile phones for a limited amount of time, only during some serious incident. Other phone and internet services were wrking fine.

Its like that Bender meme... "Fine! I'll make my own internet, with blockers & blackouts"

@TechAltar Your thumbnail is wrong, the island of Taiwan doesn't belong to the PRC (and never has).

Proof that the reason we don't live in a real high tech society is old rules and narrow minded politicians ☹️

There are some regional ISPs in India which uses DPI, mine started doing couple of months ago on all torrent websites. Either you use a VPN or Tor or wait till 'weekend' when they remove all website censorships.

every tech altar upload is always sucha banger :)

Hey, can you do a second video that discusses the potential positive aspects of the splitnernet?

They used to do deep packet inspection in Tunisia but it slows the web down enormously.

Splinternet is a two way stream, basically all countries should be marked red.

I'm from India and the internet blackout is a nightmare here. For as long as 1 year or more. Leaving students without any access to any study material or even simple Google search. Often state wise this is done which completely blocks the cell towers not just internet .

Also when Australia and New Zealand banned certain sites and users during a certain incident in NZ.

Really informative video. Smaller nations have begun to employ IPX to control the internet when the authorities deem it necessary.

Every country should have full control over its own internet assets and services. This is true democracy. And no other country should be able to interfere or spread propaganda against other country's will.

This was inevitable. The nations that did not have the knowledge, infrastructure or personnel to roll out their own networks paid those that did for assisting with their network rollouts and over time acquired whatever they lacked. Now they can push the technology where they want it to go within their own borders. Our cultural expectations around the globe are simply not fully compatible and now that it is possible for nation states to control the flow of information, that is what will happen.

35+ countries who represents the bulk of the world population, building fire walls is not cutting themselves off. What they are doing is isolating what they see (and should) as a problem (e.g. to prevent what happened to many countries in the middle east, South America and Africa from happening to them.) Companies like Facebook, twitter, google, BBC, CNN, and etc are all subsidiaries of each's respective governments. Which play a crucial roles in their foreign policies and secret service. Which, so far, have proven damaging to global peace and stability (as we witness non-stop conflicts arising through these programs.) I.e. if foreign secret service and other government entities were setting up proxy companies to further their own goals here (in the United states.) We would do far worse. Infact, we likely already have done so to foreign companies- just for being from particular countries. Rather than doing so because of actual evidence proving foreign intrusion (such as what is globally known of what CIA, MI6, EED, NED and etc do around the world.)

I'm from Iran and from the get-go I knew you would mention my country like 20 times during the video :D

Regarding India, the large blockade of Internet is not entirely true. These shutdowns are just on paper so that, most of these are just limited to removing some apps from Playstore while the others are easily bypassable by a VPN. About blackouts most of these are limited to the state of kashmir due to security issues (b/w 400-700 terrorist attacks occur in this region an year on average so it's understandable) a few were implemented for a few days when ethnic fights occurred in some states.

That was something that people should have seen before putting restrictions on contents. For instance, take a look at any SM post and you would see left censoring right and vice virsa. Not just that, in a lot of "free countries" is US and EU a lot of Chinese sites are banned/restricted. While on forums anyone with some different views are targeted. Many used to argue that countries restrict internet to people in oppressive countries to control the population, But none consider the fact that whenever you see a lone, Chinese or Russian on sites disagreeing with the western perspective of their countries they are banned or labelled sympathizer or something that the audience considers convenient. You can make the argument, that they are parroting their govts propaganda but the same can be said for you. Anyways, i used to argue that those who say that China should open up its population to internet , would be the first ones to complain about it. You barely see a chinese citizen on the internet, yet when they come out and share their POV, everyone resorts to labels, insults and attack them. Now imagine if the 1.4billion Chinese got connected to the internet and lets just say half of them started sharing their content and their perspective and started calling out western content and defending their countries policies. Imagine if Vox, VICE type Chinese channels appeared on UKposts and started making similar videos, would they stick on UKposts or be censored? Remember Half of Chinese population is still similar to US+EU population. Most of the people would just be annoyed by the Mandarian text. The day countries controlling the firms decided to dictate the platform policies, the internet died. You can all blame China or Russia for cutting off their population, but if they didnt do it, US/EU would have censored content from those countries themselves.

This was fantastic

@TechAltar, I found a small typo in this video fragment 11:10 Runet is the Russian segment of the Internet in cultural terms. And the independent closed network is called Cheburnet. On behalf of Cheburashka, a character from a Soviet book

Hey TechAltar, pls whats the World Map you used in the start of the video ?

Yes depressing indeed. But we have internet censorship here in the uk. Virtually all Russian news media has been censored. And if you look at things from the other countries perspective, the internet as a whole is pretty much under at least the influence of Washington and if a country see’s Washington as hostile to them it’s wise to be able to have a functional internet if Washington decides you are going to be shutdown

Thanks!

In syria we have 2 kind of Internet black outs, and I'm not sure of one of them because I wasn't living in syria at the moment... the first one is the school final exams black out, the most annoying because when I need the Internet it's just not available since 5am until 11am when exams end, this kind of black out is just to avoid people cheating on exams and they also ban phone calls and messages in those 5 hours, this only happens for a month until the bakaloria degree is finished, tho this year wasn't that bad, they were more flexible... and the second kind of black out I assumed was in war times... also Syrian IP is banned from some online services because of sanctions so we use vpn to use Google play store and some services like epic games store and other websites but Google services are avaliable always, and one good thing is that I don't get any kind of youtube adds because of it, Internet in syria is flexible and that's a good thing because I can still have access to many pages including CNN and BBC, but the one we can't access are because of sanctions

You missed internet based attack by other countries if you are not independent Like internet based financial services denying .

This makes me think Tor is going to actually become the new Internet.

Okay fyi India does have more internet blackout But the blackout wasn't imposed all over the country 90% of the time it happens in the j&k state because it's a sensitive state with international border clashes I was genuinely shocked by looking at 1000+ number and not experiencing more than 2

I love this, I need with this

here in Iran, the thing knows as "internet" doesn't exist here anymore because the blacklisted websites and sevices basically contain almost all global messaging and social media platforms. even youtube is blocked and we can only access it through VPNs. and in the times of social unrest and protests this goes even further, and shapes the "intranet". which basically means only websites that are hosted domestically can be accessed. so even VPNs aren't usable and the workarounds are too technical for an average user, you can't even use google during this time. of course if shit really hits the fans the still tend to click the off button altogether (this is happening right now at several cities). and they're pushing for more, they're trying to replace all foreign services with garbage domestic alternatives (which are all spywares btw). each day, more and more VPN protocols are being blocked and the global bandwidth is getting lower and lower.

me from ethiopia who didnt know that we had 18month blackout watching this 0.0

Hello from Russia. Just want to say that I really doubt that our government would be able to fully isolate the whole country. Nowadays, the internet is a part of everyone's life so moving in our servers may take years upon years, let alone preparing those servers and PROPER testing, not just "they didn't explode after a day of work in a small town, we good" stuff. And I don't think the servers will last long. If a russian sees a hole, they will get as much profit from it as possible and make it big enough so a lot of people could have fun either, LOL. And modern censorship needed to grow stronger and start blocking VPN so we... could continue using VPN and even spread the info about how to make such a service yourself. So... yeah, it will definitely take a while. P. S. I read a few comments about Russians not knowing why Ukraine is being attacked. There's more than enough info about anything you like, bypassing censorship is still not so difficult - it's just the people that do not want to gain it; you know, living in a small info bubble where you are always liked and can say as awful thing abouts the opposition as possible, just like the flat Earth believers. And, unfortunately, those are usually the ones that scream louder than anyone else.

Cyberpunk 2077 is becoming more and more realistic

DPI is getting more and more inefficient as TLS encryption is becoming more and more the norm.

in Sudan during the last protests during 25 October 2021 coup, the Junta block all the Internet for entire 2 months except for all banking systems and the Terrestrial Internet was completely open but for for users who are registered as enterprises and organisations not as individuals in their Internet provider database.

Strange thing, I have a webpage , and it was not visited some time and suddently people from every part of the world came to see it, one visit from every part of the world (alaska, russia, africa,...). Does the internet really work or only the content is copied one time and connection "closed"?

From Western point of view this whole thing looks like simple censorship. But when you look at it from China's or Russia's perspective you understand why they are worried. Which government would like to hand over all the personal information of its citizens to other (and many times hostile) governments? Would the US be OK if every American citizen's eating habits, health issues, political orientations and everything in between were in the hands of the Russians? Even I, as a western, am not comfortable with the idea that everything I do on the web is known and monitored by Zuckerberger or the guys at Google. The internet is neither free nor global as it stands now; it's in the hands of a few Western "tech oligarchs".

India has no plan to disconnect from global internet. However it can monitor data to and from in it's sovereign interest. And it can't fully compromise on data security.

BBS and phone may do a comeback? I know that when I had a BBS with Frontdoor there was much traffic i some odd image groups, according to some those fractal like images did contain text or messages. To block phone calls within a country may be harder and even harder to ban image formats like PCX.

+ Saudi and UAE restricting internet (many VOIP services and other sites blocked) also VPN use is interfered with 😢😮

Iran: we have the internet at home The internet at home:

Every information has its influence. Whether it's theory of evolution or curvature of earth, they may look known facts to us but are controversial in some part of world and internet, that's why every group tries to manipulate information to its own bias no matter how subtle it is

The solution will be very simple each country has to build a country-wide network and the countries you trust to connect and deal with.

The most basic control they use for us is Language..... them religious..... and so on

The US does motivate the splinternet though, with it's effective information war abilities to regime change foreign governments, for better or worse. Other countries probably do it too, to try to trigger or feed protests that might bring down governments that are deemed unfriendly, even if those governments are popular or popularly elected.

Thats a great THUMBNAIL

Routers machine profiles in wood pieces. A home DiY router in North America contains a 3/4 hp motor, as it draws less than 15 Amps at 110 volts.

Wow, what an informative presentation! Great job😊

What a banger thumbnail

Uganda and Tanzania have recently experienced internet blackouts during their election seasons.

Never has slowed me down, VPN is everywhere

“If the government gets to big freedom is lost”

Indian here, it's not that bad currently, blackouts are mostly reasonable and area specific (most of them are in kashmir). But, there's a new draft bill proposed very recently, a part of which worries me that they want it the splinternet way in future.

Companies can be regulated much easier than P2P based alternatives.

Best news channel ever. Keep doing what you do 🙂

Damn. Had no idea it was this widespread already.

1984 anyone?? Completed reading few days ago.. and this video feels scary. 👁️

Satellite based internet connections says hi. In a few years the equipment will become very hard to identify and even harder to block. It’s a battle those countries will never win

Rajasthan (a indian region) cutting internet of entire state (region) just to prevent question papers leake during highschool exam atleast twice a year

this seems to be mixing up the internet and internet services.