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I recently discovered that my ISP was blocking the domain 'rt.com'. This is the domain of a 'sanctioned' media company, Russia Today. Prior to Russia invading Ukraine, this was a mainstream news source.
As it turns out, the UK government proposed and passed a law to sanction this company within 2 days. ISPs interpretation of the law was that they had to block the domain. This was the minimum they could do to comply.
Even looking to Andrews & Arnold's RevK, someone who has fiercly fought government wrongness and stupidity in the past, gives us no solace:
The latest crazy law (RevK's Ramblings)
The level of 'meh' on this development has kind of shocked me. DNS is a fundamental aspect of the Internet. It's one thing to self-censor (e.g. content-blocking) as an informed choice, but it's quite another to enshrine censorship into law.
The fact it took me so long to discover this should show I am not a regular reader of Russia Today, but I eventually did have a need to check an opposing version of events and it turned out to be censored.
Please consider the implications here and join me in condemning what the government did. It's a terrible precedent.
I don't see wars as intrinsically good vs bad. By default I see them as bad vs bad, with people like you and I the worst affected. I'd prefer to be able to say, "get your weapons the fuck off my lawn"
The easiest way to circumvent this is to configure a different DNS server for your networks than the one typically given out by UK ISPs. Google and Cloudflare operate DNS on 8.8.8.8 and 1.1.1.1 respectively. Either would work, however, you're just handing out yet more information to companies that surveil you, but it works if necessary.
A more comprehensive list of public DNS servers can be found here:
Alternaively, use something like Pi-hole to provide DNS (and DHCP too, if you want) for your local network. I used to use this in the past, and it worked really well.
It's also relatively easy to just set up your own resolving name server if you run any Unix-like OS on any of your local machines. You may even already be running some. I use 'unbound' on Debian.
However, since the UK government shennanigans only affected two domains, I simply did a manual DNS lookup of e.g. www.rt.com and added it to /etc/hosts.
178.176.128.128 www.rt.com
As said above, this is a terrible precedent, even if the immediate consequences are minimal.