How countries like China and Russia are able to control the Internet

China, Iran, and others are known to regularly censor content and cut off sections of the internet. This is because, when the physical routes traffic takes are severely limited, it endangers the free flow of information the internet was supposed to provide. Researchers at Harvard attempted to identify these choke points, and determine how easily a given country could control its internet. Their research, published in 2011, analyzed data collected by the Center for Applied Internet Data Analysis on trace routes — actual paths taken by data transferred across the web.

The final structure of Russia’ Internet is different — it is a radically decentralized one. The best explanation for this is cybercrime. Cybercriminals tend to create nebulous networks to blur the understanding of their activities. By creating intentionally complex systems, they can both hide their tracks and make their systems very difficult to shut down from the outside.

The trade-off with such a system is that Russia loses some ability to track and censor its networks. So while Russia may be consider a larger threat to the US than China when it comes to cybercrime, Russia has at the same time been soliciting China for advice on how to structure its Internet.