Paper short abstract:

This interdisciplinary research analyzes how indigenous people of Russia are facing Internet censorship and shutdowns. It approaches the so-called “runet” not as a homogeneous space, but as a multitude of lived experiences, developing a decolonialist view on russian project of digital sovereignty.

Paper long abstract:

This talk proposes to look at the russian digital sovereignty project as a form of digital and infrastructural colonialism. First, it provides an analysis of a corpus of Telegram channels of indigenous, decolonialist and regionalist movements to map the growing space of "post-Russian" discourses.

Secondly, it uses network measurement tools such as OONI probe, and open data from traffic monitoring platforms such as IODA to analyze local shutdowns and censorship of websites and messengers in the regions during mass protests (namely, in Bashqortostan, Ingushetia, Dagestan).

Our research suggests to consider inequalities of access to information and connectivity across different territories of the so-called Russian Federation. It describes the so-called Runet not as a homogeneous space, but actually a multitude of different "lived experiences". It proposes a framework to analyze regional shutdown-resilience and understand how Russia has been tightening its control on specific regions.

Russia has a diverse ISP market and counts more than 3500 Internet Service Providers. However, these ISPs are not equally distributed across the territory, especially in non-central regions.

We analyze how this infrastructural scarcity and consequent centralization of Internet routing in specific regions affect people’s access to information and basic services. Our talk is using a rich ethnographic material from web-ethnography and in-depth interviews to show how indigenous activists experience censorship, develop circumvention strategies and how this shapes their digital self-representation