> But the journalists present this story as Russia's voluntary step towards isolating itself from the global internet. I am not sure why.
Because control over access to the web is a theme of lawmaking and enforcement here for almost ten years. This is not an isolated initiative. I'd also very much like to know what exactly the ‘test’ consisted of, but there's no doubt that Russian government dreams of having a Big Russian Firewall and the rest of the wonderful Chinese inventions.
Like e.g. having some government-mandated apps preinstalled on every phone sold here, which is coming into force in some following months. Like having messenger users identified by linking them to phone numbers, which is already a law and soon will be a law for email too (if I didn't miss it having been passed).
> Like e.g. having some government-mandated apps preinstalled on every phone sold here, which is coming into force in some following months.
It is the news the exact meaning of which is open to interpretation. Given that those pre-installed apps can be uninstalled, we should at least allow a possibility that rather than being an insidious tactic to spy on users this is simply a clumsy protectionist anti-competitive legislation to stimulate growth of local tech companies.
For starters, where do you see that the apps can be uninstalled? Since when system-installed apps can be removed by a user without rooting or replacing the system?
Secondly, pretending that this is an independent event and that the government, Duma, courts and police have a shred of good will after what they were doing for the last ten–twenty years, is so laughable that your insistence on that interpretation is baffling and suggestive.
Even if by some miracle the apps are innocent at first, nothing prevents the FSB from slipping in different functionality after a year, or even in an update.
> For starters, where do you see that the apps can be uninstalled? Since when system-installed apps can be removed by a user without rooting or replacing the system?
Which is an issue that affects pretty much every smartphone with a default Android ROM: Google is baked deep in there, often there's a ton of additional smartphone vendor bloat and trackingware.
A lot, if not all of that data can be accessed by US intelligence agencies trough the third-party doctrine [0].
The same applies to the biggest social media companies out there, they are all US based: Billions of people, all over the world, tell Facebook their deepest secrets and most personal and private details.
For any non-American that's a massive OpSec risk just waiting to happen, its making large parts of populations suddenly very transparent and vulnerable to all kinds of nasty tactics like blackmail [1].
Which is one of the main reasons why countries like Russia and China push domestic alternatives: It's not all just about controlling the platform, the biggest part of it is giving their citizens a local alternative that doesn't mass-scale dox them to an "adversary state".
In that context, I consider it kinda weird how US Americans freak out over TikTok being Chinese and some app by Russian developers sending data to Amazon servers, supposedly being "massive security risks".
But when other countries don't want to give up their populations data wholesale to the US, that's suddenly made out as pure oppressive authoritarianism.
You are not wrong, but right now the consequences are materially different.
As a Russian citizen it is not uncommon to go to jail for two years for expressing anti government views online, that kind of thing does not happen int he west - for now.
It doesn't happen in the West, because the West rather makes it happen in the Middle East [0], to such a degree that whole generations of people have been scarred for life [1].
While at home we jail people for viewing "terrorist content online" [2], which is so vaguely defined that it regularly ends up being "The other sides PoV", if that PoV even manages to penetrate to the everpresent layer of moderation on social media [3].
After terrorism, the next thing is now "hate speech" [4], and as much as US Americans think they are immune to such trends, they really are not. US millennials increasingly welcome and actually demand more moderation because they think that's gonna solve their right-wing extremist problem.
> It doesn't happen in the West, because the West rather makes it happen in the Middle East
Uh, I get that you want to highlight the hypocrisy of the west, but that was an astoundingly poor argument: By killing Pakistani the west silences criticism at home? And then as proof this happens you link to examples of domestic criticism?
> have a shred of good will after what they were doing for the last ten–twenty years
If by the "good will" you mean whether they are earnestly concerned with improving the quality of life of ordinary Russian citizens, then the answer is, most likely not.
But between this and the worst possible interpretation (oh, they must be doing this to allow the FSB easy access into everyone's phones) there are various other possible interpretations, involving various degrees of self-indulgence or maliciousness. Can it be cheap publicity or a symbolic gesture? The first sponsor of the legislation is a member of LDPR, a nationalist party which is obsessed with Russian identity and isolationism. Can it be part of the import substitution project that Russia has been pursuing (largely unsuccessfully, I understand?) since 2014, to loosen its dependency on foreign imports? Can it be a protectionist measure to help otherwise uncompetitive local businesses? I think any of these options is realistic enough to explain the existence of the bill, even without going all the way to regarding it as a covert Kremlin/FSB operation. Which of course it may be, but it is simply too early to tell. I am sure in half a year — or whenever distributors start pre-installing prescribed apps — security experts will let us know whether these apps, besides just being a nuisance, are actually doing something malicious. Then we will have actual facts at our disposal, not just worries and speculations.
Do you remember the much-maligned Yarovaya law from several years back? Has it had any scary practical consequences on the Russian internet?
A good 50% of phone users could probably do it without assistance, and people can always have someone else do it. Rooting a phone is really not difficult, simpler than installing windows xp used to be.
Because control over access to the web is a theme of lawmaking and enforcement here for almost ten years. This is not an isolated initiative. I'd also very much like to know what exactly the ‘test’ consisted of, but there's no doubt that Russian government dreams of having a Big Russian Firewall and the rest of the wonderful Chinese inventions.
Like e.g. having some government-mandated apps preinstalled on every phone sold here, which is coming into force in some following months. Like having messenger users identified by linking them to phone numbers, which is already a law and soon will be a law for email too (if I didn't miss it having been passed).