My concern about RPKI is legal pressure on the registries. By centralising all of Russia's allowed routes on a database server in the Netherlands and automatically enforcing it, it's trivial for the Dutch government to cut off Russia's internet access by tampering with that database.
I'm reminded of Vernor Vinge's novel Rainbows End, which is set in 2025. It features a cyberattack against a rogue AI, which involves revoking a root CA certificate belonging to Credit Suisse, causing massive collateral damage to the European economy and infrastructure.
Vinge didn't quite get to see his rogue AI prediction become (sort of) reality, right on schedule, but he did at least outlive Credit Suisse.
It's already happening, you cannot access the websites of many sanctioned Russian entities without trusting a Russia-issued root CA. The fragmentation of the Internet is already in motion
RPKI isn't necessary for this hypothetical to happen, and there's a lot easier ways for various governments to put pressure on network providers to do their bidding.
Without RPKI, it would be easy for many governments to cut off Russia's internet access by launching a BGP attack.
Assuming the Netherlands was acting unnilaterally, Russian ISPs would be able to coordinate with other ISPs to get back online via other routes. Assuming Russia's enemy wanted to press the issue, it would quickly devolve into a political question of who wants to allow Russian peering, who does not, and who is willing to not peer with peers of Russia (and peers of peers, etc).
This has always been the case. The internet is a network of networks; all of which are subject to control by their host governments should they choose to exercise it. With or without RPKI, a partitioning of the Internet for a significant period of time was always going to be a political decision.
That would be great. True decentralisation of global web is long over due. Specially considering the direction of change in global power structure, it is best we don’t have a second grade power at the helm.
There's no reason an independent entity couldn't spin up a new trust anchor, as long as they get RPs to follow it. If a government started meddling with an RIR's RPKI database, that would provide a pretty good set of incentives for an AltDB-but-for-RPKI TA to gain adoption. Even in the absence of meddling, this would be useful for legacy IPv4 holders, who currently don't have a way to participate in RPKI.
If that were to happen, everybody in Russia would just turn RPKI enforcement off, so this would only turn off their internet access for a few hours at most. See the recent .de DNSSEC failures [0] for an example of this.
Also, the registries are already capable of unilaterally transferring Russia's IP space to somebody else, so if they transferred it to AWS (for example) and they immediately started using it, this would have a similar effect, except this couldn't be fixed by toggling a switch, since it would mean that people would need to choose between connecting to either Russia or AWS.
And Russia's peers and the rest of the wider internet? It doesn't matter what rostelekom does if Comcast feels that all routes originating from rostelekom are invalid, and doesn't propagate them. And that's not even a tier 1.
If Comcast's customers (big corporate ones, they don't care about regular people) complain, then Comcast would probably override the RPKI validation too. Well, unless they're somehow legally precluded from doing so, but in that case RPKI hardly matters since they couldn't peer with them even if their routes were valid.
They'd be connected to a non-sanctioned network that was connected directly or indirectly to rostelekom. For instance maybe Arelion, which is Swedish. The internet isn't yet in the situation of the financial system where the whole world obeys US rules out of fear.
Well if that happens, operators will be forced to make a choice - comply with it, or stop using rpki.
Having a system like this is like signing an agreement. Its only worth anything so long as people decide to respect it. If operators overplay their hand, people might stop respecting it.
> By centralising all of Russia's allowed routes on a database server in the Netherlands and automatically enforcing it, it's trivial for the Dutch government to cut off Russia's internet access
And nothing of value would be lost. Quite the opposite in fact.
Terrorism is the excuse they normally use yes, it's very easy to call anyone they don't like a terrorist and then do anything against them. Look at Autistici/Inventati, it wasn't safe in Italy, and just this week, Dutch police under orders from the US have seized one of their remaining physical servers.
Copyright infringement is the other big excuse. People like Louis Rossmann get their journalism taken down because they showed 3 seconds of something relevant to the story.
The Netherlands won't do it. Personally I think it shouldn't, as it'd set a sort of precedent that would be easy to abuse in the future, but the actual reason is that the Russian influence found a fertile ground in the NL, with about a third of the votes going to pro-Russian parties and with the destruction of MH17 basically gone from the public discourse.
Well, I didn't mention Gas because US is not selling Gas to EU, but they do in fact sell Oil to EU while buying Oil from Russia. It might not be the exact same oil and cycled through the reserves, but same thing.
> but the actual reason is that the Russian influence found a fertile ground in the NL
Are they stupid and can't think for themselves? The Netherlands have strong democratic tradition and great public education system. Why would they be influenced by a foreign government? I always find it amusing.
> The Netherlands have strong democratic tradition and great public education system.
Unfortunately, for the same reason that Russian influence found fertile ground in the US (MAGA), France (both le Pen and Melenchon), Germany (AfD and BSW), Italy (Berlusconi, Salvini), Hungary (Orban/Fidesz), Poland (PiS), Slovakia (Fico), the UK (UKIP, Reform, and relating to Brexit, the Tories)...
Unchecked globalization has led to serious economic devastation, and Russian propaganda picked that up and blamed it all on immigrants, and added a bunch of LGBT hate on top because that serves as a decent wedge issue for a group of the population that the anti-immigrant stuff doesn't catch that much. And on top of that, they made the immigration issue so much worse - Libya, Syria, Afghanistan and Iran all have Russia's bloody fingerprints all over them.
And as we're seeing, even the best democratic tradition doesn't stand a chance against economic misfortune.
As Italian, I would say that the most pro Russia party are M5S (Conte even invited Russian soldiers to help us against COVID) and Futuro Nazionale (Vannacci). Even AVS and part of the PD are "pro-peace", AKA pro-Russia.
Salvini said that he is pro Putin, but Legal voted to send weapons to Ukraine.
> And as we're seeing, even the best democratic tradition doesn't stand a chance against economic misfortune.
This fact is why I think regardless of governing ideology, it's in the interests of any government to not write off wide-spread destitution and inequality as merely the cost of participating in a global economy. Even the Romans two thousand years before us understood all regimes require their bread and circuses, and the first one is the more important of the two.
As a Briton it's a particularly frustrating time to live here. We have wasted the 'peace dividend' on luxury policies like giving incumbent homeowners massive regulatory power to constrain the housing supply with lots of harmful knock-on effects, putting economic stupidity like Brexit to a constitution-breaking and divisive referendum, and harmfully constraining the energy supply by letting every self-interested QUANGO and NIMBY block renewable/nuclear power and the associated infrastructure. We spent more on the paperwork before a single shovel entered the ground on a tunnel under the Thames than Norway did building the longest road tunnel in the world. We cannot continue enacting nonsense policies like this and expecting everyone to muddle through as things get bleaker and bleaker, it'll come to a head one day and when it does it'll be destabilising.
Economic prosperity, or at the very least not having lost decade after lost decade, is necessary to avoid more authoritarian forms of politics coming to power.
You just demonstrated a big problem with our politics. People lining up with their side on every issue. I think most of what you say is reasonable (although you are missing nuance on some things) but then you call Brexit it stupid and "constitution-breaking". Obviously the majority who voted for it disagreed, and being in the EU without having had a referendum (unlike most countries - France, Ireland and others did, Iceland just did too) was itself divisive. There is not rational reason to call it stupid. The predictions of economic disaster (e.g. the pre Brexit treasury forecast) did not materialise and the economy is doing about as well as comparable EU economies.
Cameron's policy of offering a referendum in 2015 was a stupid political move in my opinion, he learned the wrong lesson from the Scottish independence referendum in 2014 and gambled the future of the country not out of any democratic principle, but for short-term domestic expediency. The referendum was a fundamentally ill-conceived thing, it was a knee-jerk reaction on the part of the Conservative Party who feared a) that Cameron could not maintain discipline over the right of the party and b) that the Conservatives would bleed voters to Nigel Farage's then-party UKIP to the right.
I'm not opposed to voting on EU membership in general, but the way the actual referendum was conducted was poor and it's increasingly clear that Russia attempted to interfere with it as well. Compare it to the Scottish referendum which was pretty well-conceived, the Brexit referendum looks amateurish in comparison. The reason is because it had very little to do with the government suddenly sprouting a love of participatory democracy, and everything to do with Cameron thinking that because he had won one referendum and ostensibly stopped the Scottish nationalists for a generation he could do the same to UKIP and the right of his own party. Scottish nationalism is more powerful than ever today, and Brexit worsened relations with Europe at a dangerous time for international relations.
In my view the vote should have been held, a democracy is only a democracy if it's allowed to shoot at its own feet. However it should not have been rushed into being with an amateurish approach, in my view the consequences of a leave vote should have been characterised and defined well in advance; all the debate between 'hard Brexit' or 'soft Brexit' should have happened before the date of the vote was set. It also should have been more credibly secured against Russian influence in light of the adtech-driven threats to democratic integrity that were new at the time, the government appears to have been genuinely lax on this front.
That's exactly my point, Parliament is supreme. Constitutionally speaking, the Brexit referendum was advisory and could have been ignored. That would have been completely unconscionable from a legitimacy point of view though, so whatever the constitution has to say on the subject on paper an iron-clad democratic mandate to carry out Brexit was forced to coexist with Parliament's iron-clad supremacy.
This is why I think it was constitution-breaking, the constitution simply isn't set up to gracefully deal with a conflict between 'Brexit must happen' and 'Parliament cannot agree on how to carry out Brexit'. All of this against the ticking clock of Article 50 as well. Instead Boris Johnson ended up brute-forcing his way through the issue with the 2019 election and the purge of his non-Brexiteer MPs. The system did ultimately hold up (even in the face of Johnson's prorogation crisis), but I think Cameron was very irresponsible. Not for holding the referendum, but for not figuring out all the potential complexities of a leave vote before calling the referendum. The constitution got an uncontrolled stress test that didn't need to happen the way it did.
I am afraid there is no winning in either direction, you have to accept the plausible trade offs. Though on high level I do agree that it should not be centralized with one country at least. Then again the whole setup is based on mutual trust.
IP address space and the domain name system are centralized with defined roots, and IANA/RIPE could have removed russia from the internet a long time ago. A primary reason why they have not done this is what happen after the war is over, at which point the west would have Internet with root A, and Russia would have Internet with root B, and recombining A and B would be a very difficult and likely to last longer than transitioning completely from IPv4 to IPv6.
If there is a central and core theme with the Internet and all the organizations that manage the core infrastructure is the effort to avoid splitting the root.
> By centralising all of Russia's allowed routes on a database server in the Netherlands and automatically enforcing it, it's trivial for the Dutch government to cut off Russia's internet access
Yes, and? This would be a boon for the rest of the world.
We have the data. How would you like us to present it? (Bonus point if you can tell me why that will be helpful because that will help me to make a better pitch to engineering!)
A couple years ago our org made a big push to have our routes and our downstream customer routes RPKI valid. It's good to see the high adoption rate. It looks like ASPA is now available for ASN path validation. Probably should look at adopting ASPA at some point here.
Agreed, the post has a section on it: networks publishing ASPA records went from 131 to 3,272 in a year, mostly as each registry shipped signing tools. Still early, though. So far published records can verify about 3.5% of observed routing.
> Much of the jump came from one country: China went from 3.7% of its IPv4 addresses in valid routes to 83.0%, almost 60% of the global gain counted by addresses.
Interesting. China may have predicted cyber attacks in the near future. Or perhaps are readying for retaliation. It's possible their military or intelligence branches didn't anticipate this getting published. (Unless somebody knows if this year just happened to be when they decided to implement cyber reforms?)
Hey, IPInfo: Can you please add to your AGENTS.md an instruction to break up long boring writing with some metaphors, comparisons, and transitionary paragraphs? Reading that was like reading tax returns.
> Hey, IPInfo: Can you please add to your AGENTS.md an instruction to break up long boring writing with some metaphors, comparisons, and transitionary paragraphs? Reading that was like reading tax returns.
Why are you allowing your LLM to consume instructions controlled by a third party? Sounds like a recipe for disaster.
We could have done something similar here as well. It is really challenging to balance the stats and explainers. So, the approach we sometimes take with high-impact topics is to provide companion blogs and dashboards for users to explore the data themselves.
This is corporations staging another attack on sovereignty. See how much you like it when there is no country left to run to, and the only choice left is serfdom at Google East vs serfdom at Google West.
I work for IPinfo but my colleague is the author. It is very interesting challenge to "translate" vast amounts of data we have into stories that are insightful.
So, what we have been doing recently is publishing a blog and a companion dashboard. Check it out here:
Now, that is a good approach for high-impact data to build a dashboard and have a companion piece that only provides surface-level information, so it keeps things interesting and invites you to explore.
But building the dashboards is not an easy task, as you have to deal with data pipelines and work with engineering teams to bring them online.
I am absolutely not being demeaning at all, but just look at the graphics and diagram and skip the text. I think the graphics are a pretty solid explainer of what the article is about. The text dives more into granular information that you may not find useful if you want skimmable content.
I'm always fascinated by how the internet keeps getting better, step by step. RPKI is a good example ! I wonder what "RPKI" would be needed for the AI-agent-gone-rogue age
I work for IPinfo. We really would appreciate more constructive feedback on how to present data driven stories that is approachable to everyone.
> I stopped reading after the first graphic.
Now, let's see what we had before the first graphic.
1st Paragraph: Explains what BGP is.
2nd Paragraph: Tells a story about the Pakistani ASN accidental BGP hijack. A story which is known in the network engineering community, but not by most people.
3rd Paragraph: Introduces RPKI.
4th Paragraph: Summary states that builds the foundation of the article.
Then the first graphic shows the RPKI validation. That is all.
How would you structure the blog post about RPKI adoption, which is a data-driven technical story? I am not absolutely trying to be demeaning, but would you rather start from what BGP, RPKI, and those things are?
Then we have a series of community post around them:
I ”blame” <https://internet.nl/>. At some point a few years back, they started only giving 100% to an address if it also had RPKI. A shareable link with large clear text, with a numerical score that is lower than your competitors? And your competitors are sharing this link to your customers, trying to win them over? This stuff works wonders for executives; suddenly there is no higher priority than fixing RPKI.
72 comments
[ 0.26 ms ] story [ 10.9 ms ] threadVinge didn't quite get to see his rogue AI prediction become (sort of) reality, right on schedule, but he did at least outlive Credit Suisse.
Assuming the Netherlands was acting unnilaterally, Russian ISPs would be able to coordinate with other ISPs to get back online via other routes. Assuming Russia's enemy wanted to press the issue, it would quickly devolve into a political question of who wants to allow Russian peering, who does not, and who is willing to not peer with peers of Russia (and peers of peers, etc).
This has always been the case. The internet is a network of networks; all of which are subject to control by their host governments should they choose to exercise it. With or without RPKI, a partitioning of the Internet for a significant period of time was always going to be a political decision.
Until other networks choose to exorcise them and their control with it. If you play unfairly often enough, you get depeered.
Also, the registries are already capable of unilaterally transferring Russia's IP space to somebody else, so if they transferred it to AWS (for example) and they immediately started using it, this would have a similar effect, except this couldn't be fixed by toggling a switch, since it would mean that people would need to choose between connecting to either Russia or AWS.
[0]: https://blog.cloudflare.com/de-tld-outage-dnssec/
Having a system like this is like signing an agreement. Its only worth anything so long as people decide to respect it. If operators overplay their hand, people might stop respecting it.
And nothing of value would be lost. Quite the opposite in fact.
But … cutting off Russia wouldn’t be such a bad thing.
The amount of folks that excuse a lot of garbage people in power do these days for the free speech maximalists is insane to me.
Copyright infringement is the other big excuse. People like Louis Rossmann get their journalism taken down because they showed 3 seconds of something relevant to the story.
Would you stand by this statement if we did s/Netherlands/United States/g ?
It's not about the governments of today, but those of the future.
But no, getting yourself in a situation where you're dependent on cowboy regimes for critical resources is not good for the people.
Liquified Natural Gas aka LNG is a major US expert product. The American export a lot of methane ("natural gas") this way to EU countries.
I have no idea which of many factors you didn't understand here but it's a bad sign
Are they stupid and can't think for themselves? The Netherlands have strong democratic tradition and great public education system. Why would they be influenced by a foreign government? I always find it amusing.
Unfortunately, for the same reason that Russian influence found fertile ground in the US (MAGA), France (both le Pen and Melenchon), Germany (AfD and BSW), Italy (Berlusconi, Salvini), Hungary (Orban/Fidesz), Poland (PiS), Slovakia (Fico), the UK (UKIP, Reform, and relating to Brexit, the Tories)...
Unchecked globalization has led to serious economic devastation, and Russian propaganda picked that up and blamed it all on immigrants, and added a bunch of LGBT hate on top because that serves as a decent wedge issue for a group of the population that the anti-immigrant stuff doesn't catch that much. And on top of that, they made the immigration issue so much worse - Libya, Syria, Afghanistan and Iran all have Russia's bloody fingerprints all over them.
And as we're seeing, even the best democratic tradition doesn't stand a chance against economic misfortune.
As Italian, I would say that the most pro Russia party are M5S (Conte even invited Russian soldiers to help us against COVID) and Futuro Nazionale (Vannacci). Even AVS and part of the PD are "pro-peace", AKA pro-Russia.
Salvini said that he is pro Putin, but Legal voted to send weapons to Ukraine.
This fact is why I think regardless of governing ideology, it's in the interests of any government to not write off wide-spread destitution and inequality as merely the cost of participating in a global economy. Even the Romans two thousand years before us understood all regimes require their bread and circuses, and the first one is the more important of the two.
As a Briton it's a particularly frustrating time to live here. We have wasted the 'peace dividend' on luxury policies like giving incumbent homeowners massive regulatory power to constrain the housing supply with lots of harmful knock-on effects, putting economic stupidity like Brexit to a constitution-breaking and divisive referendum, and harmfully constraining the energy supply by letting every self-interested QUANGO and NIMBY block renewable/nuclear power and the associated infrastructure. We spent more on the paperwork before a single shovel entered the ground on a tunnel under the Thames than Norway did building the longest road tunnel in the world. We cannot continue enacting nonsense policies like this and expecting everyone to muddle through as things get bleaker and bleaker, it'll come to a head one day and when it does it'll be destabilising.
Economic prosperity, or at the very least not having lost decade after lost decade, is necessary to avoid more authoritarian forms of politics coming to power.
I'm not opposed to voting on EU membership in general, but the way the actual referendum was conducted was poor and it's increasingly clear that Russia attempted to interfere with it as well. Compare it to the Scottish referendum which was pretty well-conceived, the Brexit referendum looks amateurish in comparison. The reason is because it had very little to do with the government suddenly sprouting a love of participatory democracy, and everything to do with Cameron thinking that because he had won one referendum and ostensibly stopped the Scottish nationalists for a generation he could do the same to UKIP and the right of his own party. Scottish nationalism is more powerful than ever today, and Brexit worsened relations with Europe at a dangerous time for international relations.
In my view the vote should have been held, a democracy is only a democracy if it's allowed to shoot at its own feet. However it should not have been rushed into being with an amateurish approach, in my view the consequences of a leave vote should have been characterised and defined well in advance; all the debate between 'hard Brexit' or 'soft Brexit' should have happened before the date of the vote was set. It also should have been more credibly secured against Russian influence in light of the adtech-driven threats to democratic integrity that were new at the time, the government appears to have been genuinely lax on this front.
The keyword is "attempted". Its also clear they did not succeed in doing so
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cky83q49e4w0o
What part of the constitution does a referrendum break? One of the main principles of British constitutional law is that Parliament is supreme.
This is why I think it was constitution-breaking, the constitution simply isn't set up to gracefully deal with a conflict between 'Brexit must happen' and 'Parliament cannot agree on how to carry out Brexit'. All of this against the ticking clock of Article 50 as well. Instead Boris Johnson ended up brute-forcing his way through the issue with the 2019 election and the purge of his non-Brexiteer MPs. The system did ultimately hold up (even in the face of Johnson's prorogation crisis), but I think Cameron was very irresponsible. Not for holding the referendum, but for not figuring out all the potential complexities of a leave vote before calling the referendum. The constitution got an uncontrolled stress test that didn't need to happen the way it did.
If there is a central and core theme with the Internet and all the organizations that manage the core infrastructure is the effort to avoid splitting the root.
Yes, and? This would be a boon for the rest of the world.
whois is so deprecated.
How do you deal with anycast?
We show locations hints for anycast IPs.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Registration_Data_Access_Proto...
And obligatory hn link:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43384069
Interesting. China may have predicted cyber attacks in the near future. Or perhaps are readying for retaliation. It's possible their military or intelligence branches didn't anticipate this getting published. (Unless somebody knows if this year just happened to be when they decided to implement cyber reforms?)
Hey, IPInfo: Can you please add to your AGENTS.md an instruction to break up long boring writing with some metaphors, comparisons, and transitionary paragraphs? Reading that was like reading tax returns.
Why are you allowing your LLM to consume instructions controlled by a third party? Sounds like a recipe for disaster.
So, what we have been doing is we publish a blog and we publish an interactive dashboard as well
We could have done something similar here as well. It is really challenging to balance the stats and explainers. So, the approach we sometimes take with high-impact topics is to provide companion blogs and dashboards for users to explore the data themselves.Thank you very much.
I know its a tired point, but why not publish the bullet points that were the source for this text as well. I'd rather read those.
Getting another LLM to summarise back to something concise just seems wrong.
So, what we have been doing recently is publishing a blog and a companion dashboard. Check it out here:
Now, that is a good approach for high-impact data to build a dashboard and have a companion piece that only provides surface-level information, so it keeps things interesting and invites you to explore.But building the dashboards is not an easy task, as you have to deal with data pipelines and work with engineering teams to bring them online.
I am absolutely not being demeaning at all, but just look at the graphics and diagram and skip the text. I think the graphics are a pretty solid explainer of what the article is about. The text dives more into granular information that you may not find useful if you want skimmable content.
> I stopped reading after the first graphic.
Now, let's see what we had before the first graphic.
1st Paragraph: Explains what BGP is.
2nd Paragraph: Tells a story about the Pakistani ASN accidental BGP hijack. A story which is known in the network engineering community, but not by most people.
3rd Paragraph: Introduces RPKI.
4th Paragraph: Summary states that builds the foundation of the article.
Then the first graphic shows the RPKI validation. That is all.
How would you structure the blog post about RPKI adoption, which is a data-driven technical story? I am not absolutely trying to be demeaning, but would you rather start from what BGP, RPKI, and those things are?
Then we have a series of community post around them:
- https://shubhamjain.neocities.org/bgp-explainer (HIGHLY RECOMMENDED)
- https://community.ipinfo.io/t/internet-from-scratch-in-10-sl...
- https://community.ipinfo.io/t/how-your-internet-traffic-actu...
- https://community.ipinfo.io/t/understanding-an-asn-page-peer...
Turns out it was on January 28, 2025 – 20 months ago: <https://internet.nl/article/release-1.9/>