Kazakhstan Government Edict Alienates Google

Kazakhstan is the largest of the Central Asian nation states that broke away from Russia in the early 1990s.  As reported in the WSJ, the Kazakhstan government has ordered that all Kazakhstan domains route traffic to servers in country. The assumed reason is so they can evesdrop on all traffic. Technically, this seems strange. One could register a .kz domain and host a website on servers in North America.  Someone from the state of Kentucky could query the page.  Traffic would never visit Kazakhstan. Is the government requiring that all traffic be routed in country first?

I don’t think this directly affects Google’s search functionality.  It’s not filtering or blocking like China tried to accomplish.  Instead, it would require the round-about circuitous travel of packets once someone tries to read a .kz web  page.  Google stopped routing traffic to it’s google.kz server and instead dumped all the traffic onto it’s normal google.com server bank.

In Google’s words, “creating borders” on the internet is problematic in many ways.  They’re afraid of a Balkanized internet and isolated islands of the internet in disparate countries.  I wonder if this is why Google is hiring a Business Operations creative thinker to work on such problems.