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No More IP Addresses For Countries That Shut Down Internet Access (theregister.co.uk)
Governments that cut off internet access to their citizens could find themselves refused new IP addresses under a proposal put forward by one of the five global IP allocation organizations. From a report: The suggested clampdown will be considered at the next meeting of internet registry Afrinic in Botswana in June: Afrinic is in charge of managing and allocating IP address blocks across Africa. Under the proposal, a new section would be added to Afrinic's official rules that would allow the organization to refuse to hand over any new IP address to a country for 12 months if it is found to have ordered an internet shutdown. The ban would cover all government-owned entities and others that have a "direct provable relationship with said government." It would also cover any transfer of address space to those entities from others. That withdrawal of services would escalate if the country continued to pull the plug on internet access. Under the proposal: "In the event of a government performing three or more such shutdowns in a period of 10 years -- all resources to the aforementioned entities shall be revoked and no allocations to said entities shall occur for a period of 5 years."
Those countries that pull the plug don't care about IP addressing. All they care about is staying under the radar so they can continue commuting crimes against humanity.
Being able to blame Internet disconnection on external forces would just be icing on the cake.
What we really ought to do is declare free communication a human right (though I pity the person trying to figure out language allowing the suppression of dangerous misinformation, harassment, incitement to violence, etc.), then make damn sure the borders stay 'information porous'.
Just like beaming propaganda radio or television, we ought to be forcing free information flow on tyrannical regimes... at home and abroad. A government tries to lock things down, and the rest of the world should be working on whatever is practical for getting packets in and out of the 'no communication' zone.
How does this help the citizens of that country? Now, not only are they in the dark, the rest of the world is in the dark in regards to their plight as well. The governments that institute these sort of shutoffs are already authoritarian and these organizations think the best response is to be authoritarian as well?
These governments are already going to have better organization that a random selection of the population. Banning the provision to expand IP addresses to a given country will do nothing to curtail their authoritarian efforts. Having that organization already in place allows them to respond to things like this more easily by instituting other wisely used channels, especially now that they know about this new rule. Meanwhile, the citizens are left out in the cold, and have to rely on very skilled local community leaders to lead the way of change. Such change has happened in the past. However the playing field just shifted away from the citizens in a hard way if this passes.
It is getting hard to work in the world with no 'net access. The governments want to use it themselves for many reasons, including just entertainment for the party elite. So, cut that off and they are brought down to the level of their citizens, and that they don't like.
Sanctions can work when they can actually effect the powerful. If you can do something that makes their life worse, that has an effect on them, then they care. This is something that has the potential to do that.
No silver bullet, but nothing is.
Conflicts means your link neighbors will not route traffic through you anymore, because it becomes a reliability issue. And now you're effectively cut off from the Internet. If governments forced the issue we'd see fragmentation and the collapse of the Internet within that region. It's a very possible scenario, and some parties might even find it desirable.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire