For the average Internet citizen, the practical difference doesn't matter: unless you're hiding behind one of the powerhouses, everyone can shoot you off the Internet by renting a botnet for the equivalent of a dozen pizzas in Bitcoin, without having to fear any consequence. In real life, someone disrupting my business for hours would be carted off by police and I could sue their butt off for damages.
> This is the thing: cutting off diplomatic routes is almost never the right approach, even during a hot war.
There are diplomatic routes beyond the Internet, and additionally, at the moment for these four countries access to the Internet is like we'd let their landing ships take harbor at a port and let them unload their tanks in peace. We're not doing that in real life, we should not be doing that in cyberspace as well!
> The Internet is like the Olympics: it provides a way for the common people of different countries to see each-other’s good works and learn to respect one-another; even as the leaders of those countries, and asshole minorities within those countries, are making the news and fanning hawkish sentiment. Throwing out the counterbalance in such a scenario is something you’d expect an Emperor Palpatine figure to do, to engineer a war.
Given the Great Firewall of China, the almost-complete censorship in North Korea for everyone not a high-ranking party cadre and the Internet restrictions in Russia and Iran, it's hard to claim that the Internet in these countries actually fulfils that role.
The analogous approach would be to speed-limit outbound connections.
> procedures to get nation states that are a clear and consistent threat to everyone else off the Internet
This is the thing: cutting off diplomatic routes is almost never the right approach, even during a hot war. Even when someone is punching you in the face, you don’t want to tape their mouth and ears shut that they could be using to negotiate no-longer-punching-you-in-the-face.
The Internet is like the Olympics: it provides a way for the common people of different countries to see each-other’s good works and learn to respect one-another; even as the leaders of those countries, and asshole minorities within those countries, are making the news and fanning hawkish sentiment. Throwing out the counterbalance in such a scenario is something you’d expect an Emperor Palpatine figure to do, to engineer a war.
Tangent: the biggest tragedy of the modern era is that the US, Russia, and China have entirely-separate popular social networks and blogging/vlogging platforms. The rare Russian YouTuber (living outside of Russia) talking to an English-speaking audience about their real feelings toward the Russian government does so much to build bridges between countries; but there would be a ton more of them if YouTube and VK had a federated video sharing arrangement, the way YouTube does with e.g. music videos hosted on DailyMotion. If a posting on VK or Weibo could “spread out” to Western audiences without someone manually picking it up and reposting it on Western social networks, we’d see so much more cross-cultural engagement and understanding. If someone on Facebook could add someone on VK as a friend, even…
I have a strong feeling that if highly-evolved aliens ever tried to uplift our civilization, they’d start by demanding the removal of any artificially-imposed culture-level barriers to human-to-human communication.