The Economist February 19th 2022 57
BusinessDigitalgeopolitics
The Russian stack
V
ladimir putin, Russia’s president,
has portrayed his aggression on the
Ukrainian border as pushing back against
Western advances. For some time he has
been doing much the same online. He has
long referred to the internet as a “ciapro
ject”. His deep belief that the enemy within
and the enemy without are in effect one
and the same means that if Alexei Navalny,
Mr Putin’s foremost internal foe, uses You
Tube—his video of the president’s seaside
palace was viewed more than 120m times—
then YouTube and its corporate parent,
Google, are enemies, too.
Faced with such “aggression”, Mr Putin
wants a Russian internet that is secure
against external threat and internal oppo
sition.He is trying to bring that about on a
variety of fronts: through companies, the
courts and technology itself.
In early December vk, one of Russia’s
online conglomerates, was taken over by
two subsidiaries of Gazprom, the state
owned gas giant. In the same month a
court in Moscow fined Alphabet, which
owns Google, a record $98m for its repeat
ed failure to delete content the state deems
illegal. And Mr Putin’s regime began using
hardware it has required internet service
providers (isps) to install to block Tor, a
tool widely used in Russia to mask online
activity. All three actions were part of the
country’s effort to assure itself of online
independence by building what some
scholars of geopolitics, borrowing from
Silicon Valley, have begun calling a “stack”.
His efforts could serve as an inspiration,
and a model, for tyrants elsewhere.
In technology, the stack is the sum of all
the technologies and services on which a
particular application relies, from silicon
to operating system to network. In politics
it means much the same, at the level of the
state. The national stack is a sovereign dig
ital space made up not only of software andhardware (increasingly in the form of com
puting clouds) but also infrastructure for
payments, establishing online identities
and controlling the flow of information.
Benjamin Bratton, a political philoso
pher at the University of California, San
Diego, sees the stack as a set of new dimen
sions for the state, piled up one on top of
the other, each of them analogous to the
territory defined by its physical borders.
The default stack is largely American, be
cause that is where the internet grew up.
But other places are trying to differentiate
their stacks, some seeing opportunity,
some staving off perceived threats.The eu,
with ambitions to become the world’s
superregulator for all things digital, is
putting together what it hopes will be a
more open stack, less tied into proprietary
technologies and monopolistic applica
tions. India, Japan and Taiwan are all work
ing on their own distinct digital scaffolds.
Most germane to an autocrat like Mr Pu
tin is what has gone on in China. China
built its internet with censorship in mind.
The Great Firewall, a deeprooted collec
tion of sophisticated digital checkpoints,
allows traffic to be filtered with compara
tive ease. The size of the Chinese market
means that indigenous companies, which
are open to various forms of control, can
successfully fulfil all of their users’ needs.
And the state has the resources for a lot of
both censorship and surveillance.
Mr Putin and other autocrats covet such
power. But they cannot get it. It is not just
that they lack China’s combination of rigidB ERLIN AND SAN FRANCISCO
Russia is building its own alternative to Western digital infrastructure.
How far has it got?
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