Russia is escalating its efforts to curtail online freedom, taking new steps toward a draconian state-controlled Internet.
The authorities are cracking down on workarounds that Russians have been using for access to foreign apps and banned content, including through new laws signed by President Vladimir V. Putin this week. Moscow has also been impeding the function of services from US tech companies, like YouTube, that Russians have used for years.
At the same time, the Kremlin is building out a domestic ecosystem of easily monitored and censored Russian alternatives to Western tech products. That includes a new state-sanctioned messaging service, MAX, which will come preinstalled by law on all new smartphones sold in Russia starting in September.
The idea, experts say, is to migrate more Russians from an open internet dominated by the products of Western tech giants to a censored online ecosystem, where Russians primarily use software under the gaze and influence of the state. The effort has advanced significantly amid wartime repression, but it is unclear how far it will go.
“The goal here is absolute control,” said Anastasiia Kruope, a researcher at Human Rights Watch who wrote a recent report on declining Russian Internet freedom.
The Kremlin wants to control not only the information available online but also where and how Internet traffic flows, Kruope said, so the Russian internet can function in isolation and be switched on and off at will. Russia’s technical capabilities for clamping down are improving, she added.
Unlike China, where users have been restricted since the dawn of the Internet, Russia long boasted one of the most open and freewheeling environments anywhere online. Operating with virtually no barriers, millions of Russians flocked to Western tech platforms, posted critical news and freely expressed their thoughts on the web.
The Kremlin began to see that freedom as a threat, particularly after the rise of the Opposition activist Aleksei A. Navalny, who died in prison last year. His exposés of the Putin elite, initially publicised in Live Journal blog posts and later in popular YouTube videos, gave him millions of followers online and the power to mobilize mass protests on the street.
Since the first decade of Putin’s rule, Moscow had been articulating a vision for what it called a “sovereign” Internet that would sever Russia as much as possible from the rest of the online world and strip power from foreign tech firms, which didn’t always give in to the Kremlin’s demands.
But Putin’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 gave the government the opportunity to accelerate the plan.
On the eve of the invasion, the state indirectly took over VK, the country’s biggest social network, harnessing a platform with millions of existing users to popularise Russian alternatives to Western tech products. The son of Putin’s powerful first deputy chief of staff, Sergei V. Kiriyenko, was tapped to run the company.
Moscow banned Facebook, Instagram and Twitter outright and took steps that caused TikTok to disable functions in Russia. Lawmakers passed draconian laws stifling free expression in the streets and online.
Last year, after building out a video-streaming service on VK, Russia began throttling YouTube, pushing users towards the domestic alternative, though with mixed success.
Now, with the introduction of MAX, authorities have signalled they may take aim at foreign messaging apps, in particular WhatsApp, which is owned by Meta and counts nearly 100 million monthly users in Russia. Telegram could be a target as well.
Anton V. Gorelkin, deputy head of the IT committee in Russia’s Lower House of Parliament, said last month that WhatsApp should “prepare to leave the Russian market”. He said Russians would replace the app with MAX.
Through MAX, Russian officials are hoping to create their own version of China’s WeChat, an app that remains indispensable for millions of Chinese despite being both censored and monitored.
Apart from messaging and uploading posts, WeChat userscan pay utility bills, book train tickets, make payments for goods and services, apply for marriage licenses and in some places even file for divorce.
Moscow is following that model. A new law says government services must be offered through MAX. Officials across all levels of Russian government are being told to install the app. Already, local authorities have been testing the use of MAX by schools and signalling that teachers will be required to use it to communicate with students and parents.
“You need to bring it into the daily life of people to the extent that you cannot avoid this app anymore,” said Philipp Dietrich, an analyst at the German Council on Foreign Relations.
“The whole point of doing this is the same reason China is doing WeChat: the more information you can gather against your citizens, the better,” Dietrich added.
MAX’s future in part will boil down to how well it functions. Already, Russian Internet users have parodied its rollout with memes.
A popular Russian singer was ridiculed for touting the app to her 5.3 million followers on Instagram — which is itself banned — and boasting about its ability to get service “even in the parking garage”.
(New York Times News Service)