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60 Opinion COMMENT:
Russia's controversial sovereign internet bill will stoke the very protests it is designed to quell
Lindsay Mackenzie in Glasgow
Russian President Vladimir Putin on May 1 signed the controversial sovereign internet bill into law. It will come into force November 1 despite the concern, confusion and even ridicule on show during its State Duma readings. The law, still scant on detail, envisions handing much more power over the online world to the government, creating a system that would not only allow state authorities to control information flows across the country but isolate Russia's internet from the rest of the world in times of crisis.
"The main thing is to be secure from aggressive actions from abroad," said Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov in February. Officially the law is a move to protect internet access should another country seek to disconnect Russia from the world wide web. (Exactly how this would be done is yet to be explained.) Supporters cite the new United States National Cybersecurity Strategy and Internet Research Agency cyber attack as evidence of its necessity. In reality the law is an escalation in censorship at least seven years in the making.
Out with the old...
The role of the internet in Russian society has been a changing one; from Runet's early incarnation, Relcom, hosting eyewit- ness accounts of the 1991 coup d'etat, to the LiveJournal blogging and meme subcultures of the early 2000s. When Putin first came to power he paid little attention to regulating the online world. Authorities focused on monopolising large sections of traditional media, shaping and distorting its output to suit the Kremlin's ends. This influence would prove vital in the subsequent battle between the TV and the fridge.
It took the 2011/12 protests against election fraud for Moscow to wake up to the internet's disruptive potential. Online platforms such as Facebook and the leading Russian
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social media site VKontakte were effectively used to organise marches that were attended by over 100,000 people, as well as share evidence of manipulation and intimidation
at polling stations. The internet helped many previously apathetic Russians, particularly amongst the docile middle class, to become politically active. These internal pressures were matched by external ones. Moscow regarded the ongoing social media driven Arab Spring as not borne out of grassroots civil society but instead orchestrated by Western
“The main thing is to be secure from aggressive actions from abroad”
powers, utilising digital tools to foment unrest. The online world had become an agent of political change and the Kremlin saw itself as the next potential victim.
That message has been given some real poignancy recently when Ukraine’s president-elect Volodymyr Zelenskiy relied heavily on social media to sweep to a record breaking landslide victory in April’s presidential election, ousting the old guard, despite former President Petro Poroshenko’s almost complete control of the “administrative resources” used to fix elections in Eastern Europe and several TV stations. What must really put the wind up the Kremlin’s back is Zelenskiy’s threat to
go under the Kremlin’s head and engage in a discourse with the Russian people directly, by addressing them using social media. The Kremlin would have been powerless to stop Zelenskiy if he tried this – until now.
Moscow has since introduced various draconian laws, focusing on restricting content, controlling data storage and