Today (November 1, 2019) Russia’s sovereign internet law went into effect. What does this mean for netizens? What are the hurdles to making the plan a reality?

Intentions of the Law and Global Reaction

According to the Kremlin, the purpose of the law is to be able to protect Russia from potential cyberattacks from foreign powers. An estimated $300 million is being spent to implement it.

Several sources have stated that this law also serves as a move to increase the state’s ability to monitor the activity of Russian citizens. Together with Human Rights Watch, nine other human rights organizations released a statement condemning the law in April 2019.

News outlets like Bloomberg point out recent online restrictions in the country. According to Bloomberg, “A blogger was sentenced to five years in jail in September for a sarcastic tweet that the authorities claimed advocated violence.” A number of VPNs and encrypted messaging apps have been banned in Russia. LinkedIn has been blocked since 2016 for refusing to store data within Russia. While Telegram was banned in 2018 for refusing to provide encryption keys to the FSB, developers of the messaging app have used a technique known as domain fronting to partially get around the block.

Is This The Next Great Firewall?

For most, the answer appears to be “no”. This is largely because Russia’s internet was engineered to be open to everyone from its inception in 1990. In contrast, China’s internet (commonly referred to as the Great Firewall) was intended to be censored from the start. Chinese officials did this through law in 1996, only two years after the nation first connected to the internet.

Effectively, complete control of the internet in Russia is relatively difficult to master and costly to implement. Experts say that Russia’s technical implementation of its sovereign internet law likely won’t be fully ready until late 2020. It’s also not likely that Russia wouldn’t be able to shut off its connection the global internet infrastructure, particularly SaaS applications, e-commerce stores, and mobile apps. Compared to China, Russia is far more connected with international online businesses and internet infrastructure.

What Does This Mean For the Rest of the World?

The trend of parallel internets, also known as “splinternet”, is seemingly gaining more traction. This doesn’t necessarily mean that each country or region will one day have its own, separate equivalent to Google, Facebook, and Twitter as China does with Baidu, Renren, and Weibo.

It just means that the way in which large tech companies treat users and form legal policies appears to be increasingly fragmented. As PC Mag points out, Google has several cases where it changed names and borders on its mapping products in certain places. GDPR regulation means that some websites have had to restrict content to users in European countries. Twitter is required by law to block hate speech in Germany but isn’t required to do so in the US.

In conclusion, while Russia is showing how the internet is becoming more fragmented on a global scale, this is a continuation of a global trend that has been occurring for quite some time.