The Economist February 19th 2022 Business 59This is a cheap but imperfect version of
China’s Great Firewall, says Roya Ensafi of
Censored Planet, a project at the University
of Michigan to measure internet censor
ship. It has improved Roskomnadzor’s
ability to block sites and interrupt the vir
tual private networks many use to camou
flage internet usage. It also allows the regu
lator to block, as it did during protests in
2019, livevideo streaming without taking
down whole mobilephone networks.
Complementing the firewall are rules
that make life tougher for firms. In the past
five years Google has fielded 20,000
30,000 contentremoval requests annually
from the government in Russia, more than
in any other country (see chart 2). From
this year 13 leading firms—including Ap
ple,TikTok and Twitter—must employ at
least some content moderators inside Rus
sia. This gives the authorities bodies to
bully should firms prove recalcitrant.
The ultimate goal may be to push for
eign social media out of Russia altogether,
creating a web of local content controllable
through courts, corruption and loyal
thugs. But this Chinese level of control
would be technically tricky. The dpiboxes
are unable to filter out all foreign traffic. It
would also be unpopular: Russians are
rather keen on YouTube and WhatsApp.
And it would make life more difficult for
Russian influence operations, such as
those of the Internet Research Agency, to
use Western sites to spread propaganda,
both domestically and abroad.
A view to instill
“Russia is less about blocking and more
about shaping the information environ
ment,” says Justin Sherman of the Atlantic
Council, a thinktank. Strategically placed
constraints, both online and offline,
should suffice to guide the digital flow
without hard barriers. Making foreign ser
vices less reliable will shift consumers to
wards domestic ones. Facing throttling,
fines or worse, Western firms are likely to
comply with government demands, as
they did when leant on to remove apps Mr
Navalny’s supporters had designed to
show voters which opposition candidates
were best placed to win elections.
Russia’s homegrown stack would still
be incomplete without a third tier: the ser
vices that form the operating system of a
digital state and thus provide its power. In
its provision of both egovernment and
payment systems, Russia puts some West
ern countries to shame. Gosuslugi (“state
services”) is one of the mostvisited web
sites and mostdownloaded apps in Rus
sia. It hosts a shockingly comprehensive
list of offerings, from passport application
to weapons registration. Even critics of the
Kremlin are impressed, not least because
Russia’s offline bureaucracy is hopelessly
inefficient and corrupt. Sergey Sanovich of
Princeton University observes that by leap
frogging into the virtual world, leaders in
Moscow showed they could deliver, and
got a better grasp of what agencies far from
the capital are doing. Privacy concerns,
which can be a barrier to online govern
ment, were not much of a worry.
The desire for control also motivated
Russia’s leap in payment systems. In the
wake of its annexation of Crimea, sanc
tions required MasterCard and Visa, which
used to process most payments in Russia,
to ban several banks close to the regime. In
response, Mr Putin decreed the creation of
a “National Payment Card System”, which
was subsequently made mandatory for
many transactions. Today it is considered
one of the world’s most advanced such
schemes. Russian banks use it to exchange
funds. The “Mir” card which piggybacks on
it has a market share of more than 25%,
says GlobalData, an analytics firm.
Other moves are less visible. A national
version of the internet’s domain name sys
tem, currently under construction, allows
Russia’s network to function if cut off from
the rest of the world (and gives the authori
ties a new way to render some sites in
accessible). Some are still at early stages. A
biometric identity system, much like In
dia’s Aadhaar, aims to make it easier for the
state to keep track of citizens and collect
data about them while offering new serv
ices. (Muscovites can now pay to take the
city’s metro just by showing their face.) A
national data platform would collect all
sorts of information, from tax to health re
cords—and could boost Russia’s efforts to
catch up in artificial intelligence (ai).
These plans must be taken with a dollop
of salt. “Russia’s industrial policy seems
that of a superpower, but in reality it is an
economic minnow,” points out Janis Kluge
of the German Institute for International
and Security Affairs, a thinktank. Even if it
had the means, he says, it does not seem
willing to spend what it takes. Mr Putin has
said that national capabilities in aiwill de
termine who becomes “the ruler of the
world”. But Russia is not making those capabilitiesa particularlyhighpriority.
Thatsaid,astechnologygetscheaper
andmoreopenlyavailable,a countrylike
Russiawillbeabletodoevermorewith
onlya modesteffort.Stacksaremodular;
theirlayerscaninprinciplebeswapped
out.Youdonothavetocontrolallofthem
to getyourway.In otherwords,Russia
doesnotneedthelatestandsmallestsemi
conductors,say,tobuilda serviceableedi
ficeontopofwhatit has;andif it ishardto
reachwhatisavailableelsewhere,service
ablemaybegoodenough.Thecountry’s
bureaucratshaveshownthattheyareable
to learn quickly and improvise around
technologiestheylack.
Others are watching Kremlin’s pro
gress. TheyincludeIran(whichrequires
censorship by software at isps), Kazakh
stan (which may delegate some of its digi
tal transformation to Sber) and Turkey
(which demands the physical presence of
foreign firms’ content moderators). They
may back Russia diplomatically as it pro
motes its digital ambitions. Jointly with
China, Russia has stalled untalks aimed at
defining responsible state behaviour in
cyberspace, instead insisting on “informa
tion sovereignty”—code for doing what
ever it pleases. Now it wants a Russian,
Rashid Ismailov, to take over as secretary
general of the International Telecommuni
cation Union (itu), which governs swathes
of the telecoms world. Mr Ismailov’s resu
mé includes stints as a deputy telecoms
minister and Huawei executive.
Russia wants the ituto replace the In
ternet Corporation for Assigned Names
and Numbers as the overseer of the inter
net’s address system. America and its allies
will block this. But the idea appeals to
countries desiring stack sovereignty,
which may be enough to win Mr Ismailov
the votes he needs to beat Doreen Bogdan
Martin, an ituofficial from America, in
October, when the new secretarygeneral
will be chosen.Try another day
If push comes to shove in Ukraine, the
strength of Russia’s stack against sanc
tions, and perhaps other forms of attack,
will be tested. The costs could be high: ca
pabilities would be lost and networks de
graded. Russia may become more depen
dent on Chinese hardware and software,
something its own elites fear (though this
would hardly be a win for the West).
Whatever the upshot of such “stackto
stack warfare”, as Mr Bratton calls it, the
Kremlin’s efforts have shown wouldbe
imitators that there is plenty of mileage in
trying to take control of what layers of the
internet you can, and of aligning yourself
with likeminded regimes. New ways of
embodyingthe state always enable new
forms ofinfluence and diplomacy—as well
as of war.nInter-nyet
Google, government content-removal requestsSources:Company reports; The Economist *January-June230,00025,00020,0005,0000,0005,0000
21*20181614122010Tu r ke y
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