—“Why is the IT guy saying that he doubts Russia’s will succeed? Isn’t North (or south) Korea already doing this?”—Michelle German
I suspect he means that there will be some ‘cheating’ – and well that’s true
But in general, Russia and China’s effort will succeed. It’s not complicated. All that matters is that you control the input and output points, and that you can hard (physically) disconnect them. And that you maintain your internal domain name servers. There is nothing special other than DNS propagation that keeps the world systems organized.
But it still means that they can separate from the world. Same is true for their state credit card (which is awesome). It works internally just fine. If you have a state credit card, a closed state internet, and a state currency and especially if you have lots of physical resources (they do, so do americans, but europeans and chinese don’t) then you can easily cut off the world for long periods without a consequence.
France, russia, and america are relatively autarkic. Canada and america together could be. Not sure about india but I could easily figure it out in a couple of hours.