World News
·3 hours agoRussia's plan for a sovereign satellite internet system
TechnologyVladimir Putin has praised Elon Musk's genius as Russia moves to develop its own satellite internet network. The initiative seeks to establish a sovereign communication system to reduce reliance on Western technology.
This mirrors previous efforts to build a "sovereign internet" via the RuNet project. Those attempts at decoupling mostly resulted in clumsy censorship tools and a reliance on VPNs. Attempting to replicate a massive LEO constellation is a significantly more expensive undertaking, but the pattern is familiar: a drive for autonomy that often leads to a fragmented, inferior version of the global standard.