Russia and the World Wide Web

Roland Oliphant writes at the telegraph,

Russia has run large scale experiments to test the feasibility of cutting the country off the World Wide Web, a senior industry executive has claimed.

The tests, which come amid mounting concern about a Kremlin campaign to clamp down on internet freedoms, have been described by experts as preparations for an information blackout in the event of a domestic political crisis.

Andrei Semerikov, general director of a Russian service provider called Er Telecom, said Russia’s ministry of communications and Roskomnadzor, the national internet regulator, ordered communications hubs run by the main Russian internet providers to block traffic to foreign communications channels by using a traffic control system called DPI.

The objective was to see whether the Runet – the informal name for the Russian internet – could continue to function in isolation from the global internet.

The experiment, which took place in spring this year, failed because thousands of smaller service providers, which Roskomnadzor has little control over, continued to pass information out of the country, Mr Semerikov said.

... Legislation to date includes blacklisting of websites deemed “extremist” or harmful to children, making bloggers with more than 3,000 daily readers subject to the same restrictions and regulation as newspapers and television, and requiring internet companies to move all servers containing data on Russia citizens to Russia.

Critics said the extremism and child protection laws are so loosely worded they can be applied arbitrarily. Sites banned under the extremism law include the website of Gary Kasparov, the chess champion and Kremlin critic, grani.ru, an opposition news website, and the blog of Alexey Navalny, an anti-corruption campaigner and vociferous critic of Mr Putin.

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