Internet in Russia will be free, but very limited

Leonid Levin , Chairman of the State Duma Committee on Information Policy, Information Technologies and Communications, spoke at the Cyber ​​Security Forum 2015. He noted that any state policy can be aimed at ensuring the maintenance of low cost Internet access. Levin even suggested that in the future the Internet could be free for every citizen of the Russian Federation.


Leonid Levin, photo from the committee site

According to him, more than 90% of young people and more than 50% of Russians, on average, have access to the Internet, and over time this percentage will only grow. The deputy spoke about cybersecurity: “We need a massive socially approved exchange of information about malicious programs on an ongoing basis, encouraging citizens to report attacks and fraud in the network, including by announcing rewards for participating in the successful detention of cybercriminals.”
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He also enlightened Levin and the theme of Internet anonymizers in general, and Tor in particular, that has been popular recently among lawmakers. He believes that the Internet industry should, on its own initiative, propose methods to combat these phenomena until it is too late for it: “The industry should propose legislative solutions to combat illegal content, until, without waiting for proposals, they passed such a law, which would disrupt the network based on good intentions. "

At the same time, it is known that lawmakers do not listen to the opinion of industry experts, even if this opinion is expressed very unequivocally. The case of the law on the pre-trial blocking of sites, also known as the “law against the Internet”, is indicative. Despite the active objections of industry leaders , the State Duma allowed to block sites without trial.

Over the past few weeks, leaders of various organizations involved in Internet regulation have been actively promoting the idea of banning any means that allow Internet users to remain anonymous. Among them, web services for anonymous surfing and the Tor network were mentioned. A Roskomnadzor spokesman even compared Tor users with social debris and ghouls .

It can be assumed that this wave of accusations is connected with the fact that the “law against the Internet” is malfunctioning. Blocking sites at the level of Russian providers have a lot of fairly simple escape routes. It is not clear whether the legislators will even reach VPN in their prohibitive activities, which employees of many companies use for remote work. And there it will be close to ssh-tunnels, which can be used for encrypted access to the Internet via a dedicated server, but at the same time, ssh is a standard tool for remote server administration.

I appealed to the press service of major providers in Moscow with a request to comment on the emerging ban on anonymizers, but I responded to the call only from AKADO Telecom. Beeline refused to give comments, other companies simply ignored the request.

The comment of the head of the direction of the Network and Platform Development Department of AKADO Telecom, Yuri Kartamyshev:

AKADO Telecom operates in accordance with the legislation of the Russian Federation. Therefore, if Roskomnadzor, which is a state body of the Russian Federation, will include anonymizers in the list of prohibited Internet resources that we must block, we will comply with the requirement of the controlling authority.
The authors of the anonymizer blocking initiative assume that these Internet resources can be used by some users to distribute prohibited information and malicious programs. Law-enforcement agencies should evaluate actions of these citizens and the content of the content they use for compliance with the law.
Technically, you can block any anonymizer and any protocol. But sooner or later there will be new ways to get around the restrictions. Therefore, the provider will need additional costs to implement the anonymizer blocking initiative. They can be comparable or even exceed the cost of fulfilling the requirements of Roskomnadzor for blocking prohibited sites.