Putin Plots a Parallel Internet

Vladimir Putin is stepping up his war on the World Wide Web. In late May, claiming that it was key to Russia’s counterterrorism efforts, Putin signed a decree dramatically expanding his government’s power to regulate — and limit — access to the Internet for the country’s nearly 150 million inhabitants.

The edict, an update to the Kremlin’s 2014 counterterrorism strategy, gives Russian authorities greater control than ever before over the dissemination of information on the Internet. The ostensible goal of the measure is to curb language that could incite hatred and violence along racial, ethnic, or religious lines. But the real objective, observers say, is to change the way Russia’s netizens access the Internet and interact online.

This sort of censorship is by no means new. Over the past several years, even as it has stepped up its disinformation efforts abroad, Russia’s government has gone to great lengths to make it more difficult for its own citizens to use the Internet to communicate, coordinate, and connect with the rest of the world.

In 2016, the Kremlin approved the so-called Yarovaya Packet, a series of laws that expanded the definition of “extremism” and allowed for the criminalization of a highly subjective range of acts. It also provided the Russian government with sweeping authority over the Internet, lowered the bar for what constitutes inciting or justifying terrorism online, granted Russia’s powerful security agencies full access to the private communications of citizens, and mandated that telecommunications companies store data and decrypt information at the behest of the state.