"Russia 404": How much is left to live free Internet

We made the site " Russia 404 ", dedicated to the law on the isolation of the Internet - a timer, counting down the time before the entry into force of the law.


The law on the isolation of the Russian segment of the Internet will be effective from November 1, 2019: starting from this day, the Russian authorities may oblige Internet providers to block all foreign traffic.

The counter shows how much we have left to live on the free, uncontrolled Internet; it can also be treated as a visual deadline for emigration.
- Nick McFly, Evgeny Kudashev, authors of the project

The project is accompanied by a story - a fictional letter, written on April 17, 2020, which describes a new reality, in which there are families living in different countries and isolated from each other by a digital border.
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Sender: ************ <................ @ mail.ru>
Recipient: *************** <................ @ gmail.com>
Date: April 17, 2020
Subject: Another day on an isolated internet.

Hey. I don't know if you get my letters. I hope that you receive, and that your answers just do not wade through the solid walls of our secure, reliable, sovereign Internet. I hope sometime by some miracle to immediately get a pile of news from you and read them all day. However, I can’t be sure that my letters really go somewhere, so rather, I write them for myself - like a diary.

In the project's telegram channel of the same name, the authors discuss possible options for the development of events after November 1: from extremely positive, suggesting a boom to Russian Internet services and media that will replace the inaccessible western counterparts, to extremely pessimistic, involving maximum isolation, stagnation, and unfreedom.