Kremlin’s Ambitions for Internet Control Hit Technical Hurdles
Kremlin’s Ambitions for Internet Control Hit Technical Hurdles
(Bloomberg) --
A new law allowing the Kremlin to filter all incoming Internet traffic and potentially cut Russia off from the network took effect Friday, although initial tests of the hardware showed the government’s hopes of sweeping new controls over the web are likely to remain a distant goal.
Russia’s first experiments with the filtering technology caused network disruptions in the Urals region where they were conducted, according to two people familiar with the program who asked not to be identified because the information was confidential. To limit the upheaval, the authorities perform the tests at night and on a limited basis, one of the people said. The government hasn’t said when it plans to roll out the system nationally.
The law, backed by President Vladimir Putin and passed earlier this year, also calls for a “sovereign Internet” that routes traffic through domestic servers, less of a technical challenge than the filters. The law has been criticized by opponents as a Russian version of the so-called Great Firewall of China that will allow the authorities to censor unwanted content. Proponents say it will protect Russia from being cut off from the web if it gets slapped with additional sanctions by the U.S.
The new regulations are also a drag on profits at telecom operators, who are being required to install expensive equipment that can cut access to various Internet services when ordered. Among the technology being tested is deep-packet inspection, which could allow the government to distinguish between different sources of traffic and filter content from specific providers such as Facebook Inc. or Alphabet Inc.’s YouTube. It would replace the current system of blocking specific sites, which has had only limited effect.
Difficult, Expensive
“DPI is a very powerful technology, but also difficult to master and expensive to implement,” Igor Ashmanov, the founder of Ashmanov & Partners IT consultancy, said by phone. “It won’t be up and running quickly.”
Industry officials have said the filtering system isn’t likely to be fully operational before late next year.
Russia has more aggressively sought to monitor and control people’s behavior on the Internet in recent years. A blogger was sentenced to five years in jail in September for a sarcastic tweet that the authorities claimed advocated violence. Last year, a law took effect requiring records of users’ phone calls and search history be stored for six months.
However, previous Russian attempts to prevent access to content have met with mixed success. LinkedIn has been blocked locally since 2016 for not storing data in Russia, but the authorities haven’t been able to effectively cut off access to the popular messaging app Telegram. Efforts to shut down the service failed and disrupted hundreds of unrelated sites in the process, including retailers, banks and airline-ticketing systems.
The authorities have also experimented with geographic network restrictions. Many people complained of slow mobile network speeds during this summer’s anti-government protests in Moscow, while people in the North Caucasus region of Ingushetia faced a complete shutdown of mobile Internet services after anti-government protests erupted last year.
“This law is part of a worrisome trend, but I don’t see Russia ever completely isolated from the rest of the Internet,” said Artem Kozlyuk, the founder of Roskomsvoboda, a Moscow-based group that campaigns against online restrictions. “Our infrastructure is too developed and we are too integrated for that to happen.”
To contact the reporters on this story: Jake Rudnitsky in Moscow at jrudnitsky@bloomberg.net;Ilya Khrennikov in Moscow at ikhrennikov@bloomberg.net;Stepan Kravchenko in Moscow at skravchenko@bloomberg.net
To contact the editors responsible for this story: Torrey Clark at tclark8@bloomberg.net, Gregory L. White, Amy Thomson
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