No, Belarus Is Not Cut Off From The Internet, But New Restrictions Are Still Pretty Bad

(Mis)Uses of Technology

from the could-be-worse-and-probably-will-be dept

There is a lot of excitement over news that Belarus has supposedly cut itself off from the rest of the Internet, with headlines like, “It is now illegal to access any foreign website in the Republic of Belarus“. Given the continuing concern over human rights in that country, this story has a certain plausibility to it. But it’s worth exploring what the law in question actually says, since the situation is rather more complex than such headlines imply.

Google Translate offers quite a clear translation of the new law (original in Russian), which has two main parts. The first concerns businesses:

That seems to say that all online businesses must be either located in Belarus, or registered there, which might be a problem for Amazon, say. Presumably the company could get around this if it set up a subsidiary in Belarus, and then sold goods from the site amazon.by ? except for the slight problem that this domain has already been taken by a water company. However, Amazon might well decide that it is not worth the effort, and simply block all connections from Belarus.

One issue is what exactly “services” includes in the above section. If, as some have suggested, this means companies offering email, it might stop people using Gmail, unless Google also sets up an arm in the country ? wisely, Google has already registered its domain in Belarus, google.by. Clearly, much depends on how the law is interpreted (and IANAL).

As for non-commercial sites like Wikipedia, say, the paragraph doesn’t seem to apply at all, since it only concerns businesses. However, they may well be caught by other parts of the law:

These sections deal with Internet cafes and even “home networks” ? connections shared among households. It requires users to be registered, the sites they visit recorded, and the usual censorship of pornographic and “extremist” materials. It’s easy to imagine even sites like Wikipedia being branded as such (after all, it happened in the UK), and thus being on the blacklist.

So while it is by no means true that Belarus has made accessing all sites outside the country illegal, it has certainly made it risky, if not impossible, to buy stuff on external sites. Worse, it confirms that Internet users must be spied upon, and “forbidden” sites must be blocked; taken together, these new measures allow the government of Belarus to exert extremely tight control over Internet users in the country. Moreover, with these systems in place, severing Belarus from the Internet for real would be relatively easy, if its government decided to take that extreme step.

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Filed Under: belarus, censorship, foreign websites, internet filtering, privacy