How Putin Tried To Control the Internet (vice.com)

derekmead writes: In this excerpt from the recently published The Red Web, Andrei Soldatov and Irina Borogan describe how the Kremlin has been trying to rewrite the rules for the internet to make it "secure" as it is understood by Russia's secret services. "Vladimir Putin was certain that all things in the world—including the internet—existed with a hierarchical, vertical structure. He was also certain that the internet must have someone controlling it at the top. He viewed the United States with suspicion, thinking the Americans ruled the web and that it was a CIA project. Putin wanted to end that supremacy. Just as he attempted to change the rules inside Russia, so too did he attempt to change them for the world. The goal was to make other countries, especially the United States, accept Russia's right to control the internet within its borders, to censor or suppress it completely if the information circulated online in any way threatened Putin's hold on power."

Comments

Why don't we just say it?

[Chas]

Freedom and government are mutually antagonistic concepts.

Re:Why don't we just say it?

[Immerman]

Nobody said opposite - merely antagonistic. There is a delicate balance to be struck.

Any time you have a government, or at least all the attempts to date, you concentrate power into the hands of a few people. That power attracts those who would like to exploit it, and they invariably seek to increase their power (aka the power of the government), necessarily at the expense of the power of the populace (aka freedom). This is apparent in every government in the history of the world, and we have yet to find any way to keep to avoid it. If the populace wishes to preserve their freedoms then they must actively resist those seeking to consolidate power for their own ends.

Thus the two are mutually antagonistic, both pulling the balance of centralized power versus individual freedom in opposite directions. Ideally they would remain in some happy medium where freedom was at a maximum, where decreasing government would lose more freedoms to anarchy than it gains from granting more liberties, and likewise increasing government would lose more freedom to oppression than is won from reducing anarchy.

In practice we've yet to find any system that maintains such a benevolent steady state. In recorded history the balance tends to follow something like an inclined sawtooth function - government gradually expands and freedom declines, until things get bad enough that the populace unites and demands their freedoms back, and usually some new ones as well, and the cycle continues, plotting a ragged increase in freedoms over time. Of course there's always those failed states where the balance has tipped strongly towards anarchy, but the global trend seems to suggest that as a species we're still firmly on the "excessively strong government" side of the game.

I'm not normally one to say things like this...

[Sasayaki]

But this reads purely as propaganda.

"Putin is Lawful Evil, guys. He wants to control the Internet! He wants to rule over it, and over YOU, and you should hate and fear and oppose whatever he does because that's what's good for America!"

It may be largely true, maybe, that Putin believes that Russia should have domain over the Internet as it exists within Russia's borders, and there's certainly some precedent for that. Even sense. Nation-states exist to further their own interests, and the interests of their citizens.

The USA installs leaders in third world nations all over the globe based on the single, sole criteria of how loyal they are to the USA.

Russia does the exact same thing.

Great Briton did the exact same thing in the past.

The People's Republic of China will do the exact same thing in the future.

It's not news at all that governments seek to control the affairs of their citizens domestically and as much as they can internationally. This is the world of global politics. It's not different simply because it deals with the Internet; that's not to say it's necessarily good, or moral, or even wise, but that's how the game is played.

Re:I'm not normally one to say things like this...

[phishybongwaters]

I agree, this is pure propaganda. We're supposed to demonize Putin for attempting to do what the US government, CIA, NSA, DHS, MPAA,RIAA are actively doing? Get fucking bent with this blatant anti-russia propaganda.

Re:I'm not normally one to say things like this...

[Sasayaki]

I agree. Just because the NSA does it doesn't make Russia doing it right, and just because the NSA does it doesn't make Russia doing it wrong.

Russia interfering with the Internet is wrong because it's wrong.

The NSA interfering with the Internet is wrong because it's wrong.

Re:Putin's View of the Internet

[Chris Mattern]

I'd trust the Russians 1000%+ more than the US with the net.

Then you're a fool. The US wants to eavesdrop on everything said on the net, and that's bad. The Russians want to control what's said on the net, and that's worse.

Re:Putin's View of the Internet

[Sperbels]

Really? The US is far from benevolent, but it's far more benevolent than Russia in terms of censorship and dragging you off in the middle of the night to the gulag.

In Soviet Russia, Internet never disconnects YOU!

[Thor Ablestar]

how-putin-tried-to-control-the-internet (In Russian)

In short: Russian govt (Comms Ministry and Comms Supervision: Minkomsvyaz and Roskomnadzor) had performed a simulation of disconnect of Russia from the global Internet this spring. They have found that Russia is still connected, and they could not understand by what means it stays connected. They think that the problem is in lots of small providers (up to 11000 Internet providers licenses total) that have satellite links abroad.

Full Disclosure: I live in Russia. And I am quite glad that the experiment failed.