New U.N. Panel to Certify Which Ukrainian Wi-Fi Counts as 'Ordinary Life'
Citizens will need paperwork proving their browsing habits are sufficiently mundane before a lost connection can be filed as a disruption of daily existence.
Following statements that Russian strikes on data centres are meant to disrupt ordinary life, an international review panel has proposed a certification process to determine, activity by activity, whether a given Ukrainian's internet use actually qualifies as ordinary before it can be counted as disrupted.
Under the draft framework, citizens would submit browsing logs to a review board, which will sort each entry into categories such as 'genuinely mundane,' 'suspiciously productive,' and 'too interesting to be ordinary life.' Only certified entries would be eligible to appear on the official disruption tally.
"We came together to protect ordinary life," said a spokesperson for the panel, "and after eleven months of deliberation we are close to agreeing on what ordinary life is." The spokesperson then excused themselves to attend a working group on defining 'working group.'
Early drafts of the certification form ask applicants to describe their most recent internet session in detail, then rate its ordinariness on a scale the panel has not yet finalized. Appeals of a rejected application must themselves be filed online, through the same data centres under review.
Panel officials say the goal is simply to ensure that when ordinary life is disrupted, there is a proper record of it having been ordinary in the first place.