14 DAY TRIAL // The Russian president dubbed the Internet a “CIA project” and managed to reignite fears that the Internet was breaking up into pieces because of the NSA’s mass surveillance practices.
So how would a Russian-run Internet work? Well, unfortunately for the rest of the world, it seems quite possible for Russia to pull this off.
First of all, Russians are bigger fans of VKontakte, the country’s social network, than of Facebook. The fact that VKontakte is currently in the hands of Putin’s close advisors after Pavel Durov, CEO and cofounder of the company, was sacked earlier this week, is surely going to give the Kremlin enough room to control this area too.
Then, there’s Yandex, the powerful local search engine that’s particularly popular in Russia and nearby countries, where Google has been replaced by most users. One local blogger has even complained to Putin that Yandex collects and stores data on servers located abroad, which could damage the country’s security.
Putin has replied saying that there was a lot of pressure on Yandex when the company started out and that the service actually has its headquarters in Holland for reasons beyond low tax levels.
While Putin didn’t directly threaten Yandex, we could soon be hearing about the return of the wanderer son back to Mother Russia if the country indeed moves towards a localized Internet network.
This means that on top of providing people with a way to avoid NSA surveillance, the Russian government would also take advantage of the situation and gain even more control over the Internet.
It’s a dangerous situation for the structure of the global Internet, which Tim Berners-Lee, its creator, said it was under threat immediately after the NSA leaks first hit the media.
“If you can control the Internet, if you can start tweaking what people say, or intercepting communications, it’s very, very powerful…it’s the sort of power that if you give it to a corrupt government, you give them the ability to stay in power forever,” he said at the time, while also slamming the United States and other allied countries for mass surveillance.
“Unwarranted government surveillance is an intrusion on basic human rights that threatens the very foundations of a democratic society,” said the inventor of the World Wide Web.
Over the months that have passed since then, Berners-Lee has urged the community to safeguard the Internet and to maintain the original design of the web by keeping it free from control of governments or large companies.