Stories from Abroad

The tech world order that came together in the '90s at the Cold War's end is falling apart as a new rift between Russia and the West opens and a great retrenchment begins. The breakup of the USSR in the early '90s opened an era in which internet use rapidly spread around the globe and US tech companies viewed the entire planet as both factory floor and market. Working from that assumption helped a handful of companies grow to previously inconceivable size, wealth and power.

Russia is dropping a digital iron curtain over its population, creating a big, new fracture in the global internet—but there are still big gaps in President Vladimir Putin’s efforts to cut off the country from online information accessible in much of the rest of the world. At the same time, more Western companies are pulling back some digital services from Russia under pressure from Western sanctions. It is too early to say how permanent the restrictions will be.

Rumors of Russian Internet services degrading have been greatly exaggerated, despite unprecedented announcements recently from two of the world’s biggest backbone providers that they were exiting the country following its invasion of Ukraine. Just as ISPs provide links connecting individuals or organizations to the Internet, backbone services are the service providers that connect ISPs in one part of the world with those elsewhere. These so-called transit providers route massive amounts of traffic from one ISP or backbone to another.

Regulators in Europe and the UK have opened an antitrust probe into a deal between Google and Meta/Facebook on online advertising, in the latest effort to tackle the market power of the world’s biggest technology companies. The move follows US antitrust investigators who are also probing an agreement informally known as “Jedi Blue.” Google and Facebook have been accused of working together to carve up advertising profits, acting together to buttress their businesses.

Even as President Vladimir Putin tightened his grip on Russian society over the past 22 years, small pockets of independent information and political expression remained online. Any remnants of that are now gone. As President Putin has waged war on Ukraine, a digital barricade went up between Russia and the world. Both Russian authorities and multinational internet companies built the wall with breathtaking speed.

The internet promised a world in which no government could fully hide the truth from its people. Russia's free-speech crackdown following its invasion of Ukraine is testing that premise as never before. How everyday Russians view the conflict is likely to determine their willingness to support Vladimir Putin and his war. Russia has succeeded in driving out or shutting down some of the most popular internet services while also squelching the remnants of Russia's own independent news operations.

US officials are stepping up a campaign to defeat a Russian candidate for a United Nations agency that could determine how much control governments have over the internet. Russia's designs on the little-known agency raise the stakes for what the Russian government's vision of the internet could mean for the rest of the world, especially following its

Moves to restrict Kremlin disinformation after Russia's invasion of Ukraine are further splintering the global internet even as they help stem the tide of propaganda.