Migrating Servers, Elusive Users: Reconfigurations of the Russian Internet in the Post-Snowden Era

Abstract

In response to the growing censorship of their national Internet, Russian users, content producers and service providers have developed several resistance tactics. This paper analyzes these tactics with particular attention paid to their materiality. It first addresses the different levels of Internet “governance by infrastructure” in Russia, then focuses on the different tactics of individual and collective resistance and concludes by discussing how forms of control enacted at different levels of infrastructure are reconfiguring the geopolitics of the Russian Internet.

Keywords

• digital sovereignty
• Edward Snowden
• Internet geopolitics
• Internet governance
• Internet infrastructure
• resistance
• Russian Internet