Russian Ministry Wants ISPs to Filter Internet

by Bruce Etling

Thursday, October 29, 2009 at 10:20 AM EDT

Evegeny Morozov over at Foreign Policy recently shared this story from the Russian site InfoX.ru, which reports that Russia is considering technical filtering options. ONI research has not found technical filtering in Russia to date, so if this plan goes through it could be one of the
first known instances of technical filtering in Russia. The article quotes the head of the Russian Ministry of Communications at length, who argues that ISPs should filter the internet for ‘negative content’ at public access points in order to protect children, including one proposal to create white and black lists of sites. A source in the Ministry of Internal Affairs “K squad” (basically, their Internet police) seems to agree with the general idea, saying:

The Internet without filters should be closed, at least in schools.

The justification is found in the somewhat Orwellian sounding bill ‘On the Protection of Children from Information which is Harmful to their Health and Development,’ which is still being debated in the Duma. InfoX reports the following reaction on the bill:

‘In the bill it is said that users should prove how old they are, and based on that the Internet is opened. If a user is silent on this count, users are considered to be six years old,’ said Mark Tverdynin, a representative of the Regional Public Center for Internet Technologies, ‘How a user is going to prove how old they are is unclear.’

According to Mark Tverdynina, providers may terminate your access to many sites under threat of punishment after this law is adopted. ‘There is a danger that this could turn everything into an Intranet instead of an Internet,’ said the expert.

This article originally appeared on Internet & Democracy Blog.