Russian here. This is a super old claim from our government and is a common source of jokes, it’s even called “Cheburnet” (from Cheburashka) colloquially, nobody really treats such claims seriously. Last time Russian government tried to influence internet was when they struggled to ban telegram for several years, and ended up giving up, endorsing it, and moving their official resources to it.
I’m more concerned that the Luddite politicians in the west will think this is a great idea or the more power hungry ones will see it as a way to take some national sovereignty/control back from the internet–that, right now, enjoys an extra-governmental existence.
I do have mixed feelings about this. Let’s say pool it off and Russia net is now thing. That makes it harder for Russian conmen to rum various scams and hacks, ex ransomware, but it makes it a lot harder for the people there to break out of the state own propaganda.
That statement works for every other freedom you lose, it also serves to detect malicious intent from another person. There’s always a middle ground, where nothing’s perfect, but it’s balanced. There’s always a compromise. There’s no perfect scenario. If you want a perfect society, you have to take away all freedom. If you give away all freedoms, there’s anarchy.
The Russian scammers are using a ton of proxies and VPNs. Unfortunately, this change will not affect them unless the Russian government completely removes access to the global Internet, and even then, the corruption is so deep that many officials will be selling access to the global Internet to their friends or people with money.
Russian scammers and social media manipulators are here to stay, likely because they’re largely state run initiatives and they’ll still have access to the global Internet.
What this does is keep the normal Russians insulated from the rest of the world and unable to coordinate outside of their own country, where everything they do is even more tightly controlled by the government.
They might just be interested in blocking average Joes out of information. The language barrier is already pretty good at doing that, to the point that reading different language versions of Russian Today seemed to provide two different versions of the site, but if Russians can join social networks not controlled by the state to criticize the government in private groups it might be a problem for Putin.
Okay, while I’m not a fan of a fragmented internet, I am a fan of losing all the russian trolls that plague many parts of the internet and online gaming. Counterstrike and similar games will lose their saltiest players too!
1- All countries have trolls, in one degree or another.
2- That will also affect the Russian population, who will become even more isolated and powerless.
Having populations under the thumb of dictators is bad for everyone, even if you live in a relatively free country. Any tools and mechanisms they use to oppress their people are, by extention, bad.
Just to be clear, you just break two russian laws and if we was on smth like VKontacte (russian facebook, bought by government via mailru long time ago) and you was russian citizen in russia, you could be sentenced for prison from 12 to 20 years. I’m skidaddle skadoodle from russia year ago, and that was a best decision in my whole life. Sadly, not every one can leave at this point, cause europe (even when they allowed to get visa) was too expensive for average russian and smth close and more affordable, like China, Kazakhstan, etc., not too much better then russia.
It will be a bit easier for me, if you can check for yourself via translator. I use firefox TWP extension to translate sites from lang I do not know.
So, there it is, link 1, law that usually used as “appendant” for a case. Any hatespeech against goverment was determent by this law, before specific ones was introduced: link2 for example.
link3 by this law you can also get up to 5 years of prison, that one actually not so often used, but you can check for yourself, there was a list of sued people, cant find it right now. Upd. Found it!Upd1. I didnt notice until now, but site that tracked everyone, who was illegally sentenced to prison, have been liquidated in 2022 apr 5. So, it’s not updated since then and do not have people who was recently got sued.
But that all just child play, cause last couple of days they caught people link4, link5 by this law, also know as treason. Especially funny to hear that about trans dude, who just donated own money to Ukrainians military forces.
Also, if you “mass media” of some sort, or just more popular, then a stone from a road, you got this as a bonus.
List can go on, when I said about “laws that was broken” I meant only first and link4, cause they more often used, if police just need a case.
So, as you can see, Russia is a wonderful country, 10 out of 10, would never live there ever again.
Reposting my reply to someone else on this topic for visibility:
The Russian scammers are using a ton of proxies and VPNs. Unfortunately, this change will not affect them unless the Russian government completely removes access to the global Internet, and even then, the corruption is so deep that many officials will be selling access to the global Internet to their friends or people with with money.
Russian scammers and social media manipulators are here to stay, likely because they’re largely state run initiatives and they’ll still have access to the global Internet.
What this does is keep the normal Russians insulated from the rest of the world and unable to coordinate outside of their own country, where everything they do is even more tightly controlled by the government.
Large intranets are not a problem (that’s how it was in the beginning in many places, rather fast and unlimited access to LAN resources, chats etc, but slow and expensive to the Internet), it’s just that nothing inside Russia is going to be self-sufficient.
Also every dick without balls in a chair will try to get some control or share or get a bribe or just prevent this from happening so that his relative or something would get the contract.
This wasn’t a factor with the large Internet being accessible (unbeatable competition), but will be with intranets (or a countrywide intranet). Nothing will get built. In the 90s such dicks simply didn’t understand that this is a good business, so they allowed it to grow (still all the major telecom providers that survived had some connections with FSB etc, or so people say).
Also true if you consider the absolutely massive cost and effort it took China to get where they are with their Great Firewall. From what can be gleaned they also have a huge workforce of people monitoring communications as well in order to keep their internet safe for the state and “sanitized”.
They do though, some of personal blogs i follow also banned in China; There is a saying in my circle of friends in Mainland China that the blog is “certified by Great Firewall of China” if a person’s blog got blocked
They also monitor internet communications and you can get your account deleted or a police visit if you post something to critical of the state. That’s probably irresistibly attractive to Putin.
In my time working at a hosting provider we would get these very strange requests from the Russian government demanding Russian websites customers had with us be taken down for moral violations. Like a DMCA but for free speech.
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