FINDING · EVALUATION
Despite Russia's decentralized ISP ecosystem, 9 of 14 residential probes observed more than 90% of 98,098 tested blocklist domains blocked, and all 14 probes observed at least 49% blocked—demonstrating that coordinated nationwide censorship without centralized choke-points is achievable through legal mandates and commodity equipment alone.
From 2020-ramesh-decentralized — Decentralized Control: A Case Study of Russia · §VI-B · 2020 · Network and Distributed System Security
Implications
- Circumvention tools targeting Russia cannot rely on partial ISP non-compliance; assume near-complete blocking at the residential level and design for the worst-case ISP.
- Tool discovery must account for per-ISP variation: a tool effective for one user may not work for a neighbor on a different ISP, requiring diverse server infrastructure and multiple discovery channels.
Tags
Extracted by claude-sonnet-4-6 — review before relying.