Russia Excises WhatsApp from National DNS, Pushes Users to State ‘Max’ Messenger

This is Russia’s boldest step toward a gated Runet since the 2019 ‘sovereign internet’ law—an echo of China’s Great Firewall rollout (notably the 2009 YouTube block and 2014 WeChat consolidation) and, further back, the tsarist monopoly over telegraph lines in 1865 meant to police dissent. The action accelerates the global splinter-net trend where major powers erect technical and legal moats around data flows, trading interoperability for political leverage. By converting DNS control—once an apolitical plumbing layer—into a censorship switch, Moscow signals that network sovereignty now rivals currency or borders as a tool of wartime statecraft. Whether Max succeeds or Russians double-down on VPNs will shape the durability of Russia’s information cordon, but on a 100-year horizon it marks another fracture in the post-1990 ideal of a single, open internet, edging the world toward balkanised digital blocs reminiscent of the pre-WWI patchwork of incompatible railway gauges.