People are calling for shutting them off the internet, which might just be the stupidest idea ever.

To be clear, in this case “people” is the Ukrainian government, who asked ICANN and RIPE to take measures to take Russia of the Internet, which is stupid for so many reasons i’ll only list two:

• ICANN and RIPE doesn’t even have that power even if they wanted to (or rather, RIPE doesn’t have that power, and ICANN has it theoretically but using it would change the balance of power so significantly it would not play in their favor, as it would incentivize many disgruntled actors to form a unified alternative DNS root)

• Russian services have been preparing for years for that: they have a “digital sovereignty” law mandating that services remain usable when shut down from the broader internet and had at least one nation-wide test of that (yes, russia-wide transnational routes shutdown)

I think they should be given free VPN services instead.

Many people in Russia use tor. In the activist scene Riseup is very popular. For publishing stuff, in Russia it’s easy to end in jail. But for reading stuff it’s quite easy (unlike in China) to find ways around. It’s that kind of level of censorship like western ISPs do against The Pirate Bay and such: easily fooled and there’s gazillions of articles online about how to circumvent it.

So i entirely agree with your argument that helping information flow would be a more decent answer, but:

• that’s already happening
• the people asking for Russia to be taken off the Internet are not the Internet people but random politicians