Russia’s Tightening Control of Cyberspace Within its Borders

Justin Sherman wrote for Just Security about Russia's increasing state control over the internet, and what that means in the international context for the future of cyberspace as we know it.

Russian federal lawmakers have just drafted legislation that would ban the publication of online materials that “blatantly disrespect Russian society, the state, official state symbols, the Russian Constitution, and law enforcement agencies.” Such a law would exacerbate the severity of existing laws, which Human Rights Watch has said already “sought to stigmatize criticism or alternative views of government policy as disloyal, foreign-sponsored, or even traitorous” and crack down on physical mechanisms of protest like public assembly.

At the same time as that new legislation, Russia’s internet “regulator,” Roskomnadzor, has proposed a law that would permit the agency to entirely block search engines that don’t comply with requests of state authorities. Russia’s federal policies toward search engines have already been in the headlines: the government just fined Google 500,000 rubles (about $7,500 USD) for refusing to remove certain entries from its search results. In fact, Adam Segal of the Council on Foreign Relations says the new Roskomnadzor proposal stems from the dispute with Google, as the agency aims to harden existing punishments.

Yet this dispute with Google, while perhaps eye-catching, is only a small piece of a larger puzzle—Russia’s tightening control of cyberspace within its borders, and its mission to export that model of a sovereign and controlled internet to the rest of the world.