SpaceX sends additional Starlink terminals to Ukraine

SpaceX is sending more Starlink terminals to Ukraine, according to President Volodymyr Zelensky. “Talked to Elon Musk. I’m grateful to him for supporting Ukraine with words and deeds,” Zelensky tweeted on Saturday afternoon. “Next week we will receive another batch of Starlink systems for destroyed cities.”

SpaceX sent an initial shipment of its satellite dishes on February 26th following a Twitter plea from Ukraine’s vice prime minister, Mykhailo Fedorov. The delivery arrived on February 28th. Days later, Elon Musk warned Ukrainians to be careful when using the service on account of the fact that it’s the only non-Russian internet provider left in some of the more war-torn areas of the country. The warning came after John Scott-Railton, a researcher with the University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab, pointed out Russia has decades of experience triangulating and targeting satellite uplink transmissions with airstrikes.

Russia’s invasion has tested Ukraine’s internet infrastructure. Intense combat in cities like Kyiv and Mariupol has caused disruptions to GigaTrans, the country’s backbone internet provider. Over the past few days, internet monitoring organization NetBlocks observed multiple drops in connectivity. Among the most recent and potentially worrisome is the one affecting the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant, which left the International Atomic Energy Agency saying it could no longer get “reliable information” from the facility.

Internet backbone provider Cogent cuts off service to Russia

Cogent Communications, an internet backbone provider that carries approximately 25 percent of all global web traffic, has begun cutting ties with Russian businesses in response to the country’s invasion of Ukraine. The company told The Washington Post it was doing so to prevent the Kremlin from using its network to carry out cyberattacks and spread misinformation about the ongoing conflict.

“Our goal is not to hurt anyone. It’s just to not empower the Russian government to have another tool in their war chest,” Cogent CEO Dave Schaeffer told the outlet, adding “it was a tough decision.” In a statement to ZDNet, the company said it was also complying with European Union sanctions against Russia Today and Sputnik. “Cogent is not otherwise restricting or blocking traffic originating from or destined for Russia. Cogent continues to provide services to Ukraine,” the company added.

The move is expected to disrupt and slow down internet connectivity. Some of Cogent’s Russian clients include state-owned telecom operator Rostelecom, one of the country’s largest internet providers, and wireless carriers Megafon and Veon. Cogent said it was working with some of those companies to provide them extensions.

Some experts worry the move will also prevent Russians from accessing information that doesn’t come from the Kremlin. “I would like to convey to people all over the world that if you turn off the Internet in Russia, then this means cutting off 140 million people from at least some truthful information,” Mikhail Klimarev, the executive director of Russia’s Internet Protection Society, told The Washington Post. “As long as the Internet exists, people can find out the truth. There will be no Internet — all people in Russia will only listen to propaganda.”

To that point, Russians already can’t access Facebook and Twitter after the country’s government moved to restrict those platforms. They may soon lose access to Wikipedia as well.

ICANN says it won’t kick Russia off the internet

Even as governments and corporations around the globe squeeze the Russian economy through increasingly stringent financial sanctions for the country’s invasion of its neighbor, Ukraine, some within the aggrieved nation have sought to punish Russia further, by kicking it off the internet entirely. 

On Monday, a pair of Ukrainian officials petitioned ICANN (the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers) as well as the Réseaux IP Européens Network Coordination Centre (RIPE NCC), to revoke the domains “.ru”, “.рф” and “.su.” They also asked that root servers in Moscow and St. Petersburg be shut down — potentially knocking websites unde those domains offline. On Thursday, ICANN responded to the request with a hard pass citing that doing so is not within the scope of ICANN’s mission and that it’s not really feasible to do in the first place.

“As you know, the Internet is a decentralized system. No one actor has the ability to control it or shut it down,” ICANN CEO Göran Marby, wrote in his response to ICANN representative for Ukraine, Andrii Nabok, and deputy prime minister and digital transformation minister, Mykhailo Fedorov, on Thursday. 

“Our mission does not extend to taking punitive actions, issuing sanctions, or restricting access against segments of the Internet — regardless of the provocations,” he continued. “Essentially, ICANN has been built to ensure that the Internet works, not for its coordination role to be used to stop it from working.”

Senate committee advances FCC nominee Gigi Sohn

The Senate will vote on the nominations of Gigi Sohn to the Federal Communications Commission and Alvaro Bedoya to the Federal Trade Commission, respectively. The Senate Commerce Committee moved forward their nominations, though the 14-14 tie means there will be an additional procedural step for each before a full Senate vote.

Democrats and Republicans each have 50 senators though Vice President Kamala Harris has a tie-breaker vote. Should Sohn and Bedoya be confirmed as commissioners, the Democrats will hold a majority in both the FCC and FTC.

The committee delayed a vote on the nominations after Sen. Ben Ray Luján (D-NM) suffered a stroke in January. Luján, whose vote was needed for Democrats to move the nominations forward, has since returned to work.

President Biden nominated Sohn at the same time he put forward Jessica Rosenworcel as FCC chair in October. While the Senate approved Rosenworcel’s permanent appointment in December, Sohn’s appointment has taken longer. As such, the FCC has been deadlocked at 2-2 along party lines, leaving Rosenworcel unable to, among other things, advance a net neutrality policy.

Opposition to the nomination of Sohn, a longtime advocate for net neutrality, has come from a number of quarters, including the Directors Guild of America. The group urged senators to vote down Sohn’s nomination due to her “hostility towards copyright law.” Sohn was previously on the board of Locast, a defunct service that rebroadcast over-the-air TV broadcast signals via the internet. She said she’d recuse herself from issues concerning retransmission consent and broadcast copyright.

In confirmation hearings, Republicans portrayed Sohn as an extreme partisan. She hit back at those assertions, arguing that she had been subject to “unrelenting, unfair and outright false criticism and scrutiny.”

The FTC, meanwhile, is in the process of reviewing some significant proposed mergers. According to reports, those include Amazon’s planned buyout of MGM and Microsoft’s bid to acquire Activision Blizzard. Reports suggest the FTC is mulling an antitrust challenge to block the Amazon-MGM deal, though it would need a majority vote to proceed with a lawsuit.