Control by infrastructure: Political ambitions meet technical implementations in RuNet

Abstract

Discourse about sovereignty and Internet in Russia is predominantly focused on control of harmful content and information and its negative influence on the political regime and society. However, content control is not the only way to exercise sovereignty over digital media and the Web. Recently, the Russian government started to realize that without controlling Internet infrastructure, most strategies to filter and block Web sites and services are wasted. In the past five to seven years, Russia invested a lot of efforts in the development and adoption of new laws and regulations that deal with RuNet infrastructure, where the aim of centralized Internet traffic control was a real novelty, albeit a very ambitious political goal. This article tries to address the pitfalls of the control-by-infrastructure endeavor of the Russian government through four emblematic cases: the implementation of the “Revizor” system to control ISPs’ compliance to filter Internet resources from the blacklist; the battle to block Telegram messenger in Russia; the implementation of law FZ-90 (popularly referred to as the law “on Sovereign RuNet”); and finally, the ongoing experiment with free access to ‘socially significant Web sites’, which may have serious consequences in the future if used as a ‘white list’ of permitted Web resources. These four cases were chosen because they are deeply interconnected and show how the government has been gradually implementing infrastructure control in connection to content control.

The Vulnerabilities of Trusted Notifier-Models in Russia: The Case of Netoscope

“…Moreover, those applications of the database that are particularly relevant for indirect media control (algorithmic downranking of flagged domains) are considered company secrets. Recently, transparency concerns have also been expressed regarding website blocking (Stadnik, 2021). As was mentioned above, the Russian Internet Sovereignty Act enables website blocking through state-controlled deep packet inspection filters which may turn it into a black box.…”

“…The technical obstacles Roskomnadzor encountered in putting in place effective website blocking (Ermoshina & Musiani, 2021;Stadnik, 2021) have led to the restructuring of Russian internet governance through the Russian Internet Sovereignty Act (2019). This law transferred the implementation of website blocking from ISPs to the state.…”

“…Through the obligatory placement of devices equipped with deep packet inspection technologies, Roskomnadzor was empowered to directly and more accurately filter and block websites, which should limit overblocking. However, lessening the dependence on ISPs and using state-controlled deep packet inspection filters may turn the website blocking mechanisms into a black box that is non-transparent to public and providers' scrutiny (Stadnik, 2021).…”

“…Control mechanisms that function through infrastructures and the governance models involved have yet to be substantially investigated. This is of particular relevance as Russia seeks to create a "sovereign" internet whose successful realisation relies on state control over the Russian internet's infrastructure, including the creation of a national DNS (Stadnik, 2021).…”

Re-Defining Borders Online: Russia’s Strategic Narrative on Internet Sovereignty

“…She has concluded that all these methods are being implemented in Russia and that the Russian government seeks to provide "national security at any price" (Stadnik, 2021a, p. 162), to a large extent ignoring the interests of private stakeholders. In her other paper, Stadnik (2021b) examined four attempts of the Russian government to exercise control over information flows via internet infrastructure, including a blacklist to filter internet content, the law on "sovereign RuNet," the failed attempt to ban the messenger app Telegram in the country, and a list of "socially significant websites" that could potentially be used as a "white list" of accessible internet resources. She concluded that these measures "do not work as the government would wish" (Stadnik, 2021b) and that content filtering leads to, among other things, undesirable side effects for the whole network.…”