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07.02.08
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Curbing Your Online Enthusiasm
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By Oleg Liakhovich
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The Russian Internet community is steaming with heated debates and fresh conspiracy theories, spurred by a new bill proposed by the Federation Council, the upper house of the Russian parliament.
On Jan. 29, the Council’s Committee on Information Policy held a panel to discuss the bill, which addresses the issues of administrative regulation of content and activities within the World Wide Web - or rather, its Russian segment. In fact, the history of Russia’s attempts to bring order from the chaos of cyberspace is a long and rocky one. The previous move was made as far back as 2004, with a proposed bill backed by Ludmila Narusova, a Federation Council senator and the widow of former St. Petersburg Mayor Anatoly Sobchak. A few months earlier, Moscow mayor Yury Luzhkov published a fiery opinion column in the Russian daily Izvestia, saying that the Web was “highjacked by looters and pirates” and calling for a tighter legislative grip on Russian cyberspace. At the time, the bill was left on the backburner, only to resurface in recent months.
The current bill has been commissioned by the Federation Council and drafted by two non-government organizations, the Center for Internet Technologies and the Russian Association of Electronic Communications.
Responding to allegations of censorship, lawmakers insist that the bill’s sole purpose is to "establish the principles and main directions of regulating legal issues within the Internet in Russia." The promulgated bill is a so-called model law, meaning that, if passed, it wouldn’t be binding, but would provide courts and other lawmakers with the framework and guidelines to settle cases and draw further legislative acts.
Anton Nossik, a pioneer of the World Wide Web in Russia and one of the experts invited to the last week's panel, believes that the current bill tries to cover too many bases while ultimately remaining unfocused.
"There's no such thing as a ‘national Internet,’" said Nossik, who is a Social Media Evangelist with SUP, the Russian media company that came into prominence after its last year’s surprise acquisition of LiveJournal, a popular blogging service that counts millions of users worldwide.
"Trying to define the boundaries of the Web is like trying to regulate the sky. It's the same sort of abstraction. It cannot be governed by national laws," Nossik said.
Other observers muse that, considering the amount of time the lawmakers had at their disposal, it comes as a surprise that the proposed bill is hardly more detailed a rough first draft. They speculate that the committee is over its head in a last-minute effort to present its activities in a favorable light on the eve of the presidential elections, lest the new head of state wants to see some results.
“Has anything changed in the past decade? This ‘Internet law’ thing is in a perpetual state of stagnation. You can pull up any article on the matter from ten years ago and reprint it now – nothing has changed!” said Anatoly Levenchuk, an investment and IT consultant with a reputation of being one of Russia's leading Internet experts.
The China Syndrome
Paranoia has a habit of running wild when unchecked and nowhere is this more the case than on the Internet. It is not surprising then that the proposed bill raised a vast amount of conspiracy theories among the country’s Internet users, most of which, however, come down to the same old clich? of a pseudo-Orwellian state trampling on freedom of speech. Of course, such precedents are not entirely unknown. The specter of the Great Firewall of China looms large over the Russian webspace, routinely prompting fears over the possibility of similar measures that will bar the average Russian user from the likes of LiveJournal, YouTube or BBC News Online.
Meanwhile, the lawmakers are doing their best to quench these concerns. In the past, Narusova maintained that proposed measures were aimed chiefly at restricting the spread of “child pornography, human traffic and instructions on building explosive devices.” Still a vocal proponent of managing all cyber mischief, she once again denies allegations of censorship - stressing, however, that "in unscrupulous hands, the Internet often turns into an instrument of crime…and that's why legislative control is imperative."
As well-meaning as these intentions may seem, however, many members of the Russian Internet community remain wary. Programmer Maxim Moshkov, who hosts the largest online library on the Russian Web, for one, is not convinced.
“The Internet in itself is largely a self-regulating environment. It is perfectly capable of solving most of its problems on its own, without any government interference, and for years has been doing exactly that. I say it’s better to leave it that way,” said Moshkov. “Of course, the problem is that the government is eager to regulate all and everything it lays its eyes on, and, in such situation, it would be better if the said bill was drafted by Web professionals, not by bureaucrats who don’t have a clue what they’re dealing with.”
In 2004, Moshkov was among the first targets of the beginning crusade against Internet piracy, when a commercial online library KM.Ru tried to sue him for copyright violation. The case against Moshkov was based on complaints launched by three Russian authors whose e-books were sold through KM.Ru but were also available free of charge via Moshkov’s own website, Lib.Ru. In the resulted trial, Moshkov was slapped with a minor fine but found not guilty on the main charge of piracy, as he never profited from his resource and was always willing to remove any content at the first sign of objection from its authors or rights holders.
For his part, Nossik believes that, if passed, the law may potentially lead to similar restrictions that currently exist in China, with its enforced policy of Internet censorship. The ensuring effects are most clearly manifested in such practices as DNS filtering and redirection, or denying access to certain IP addresses. Thus, the list of undesirable websites inaccessible from the People’s Republic includes not only a wide range of foreign news outlets and political organizations, but also forums and various web hosting and blogging services, namely Blogspot, Wordpress, and LiveJournal.
Regulating the Regulators
Perhaps reflecting the anarchic streak in the national psyche, the mere idea of regulating the content and activities within cyberspace often meets with vehement resistance.
“Now and again, Russian lawmakers attempt to pass bills aimed at controlling the Internet. Eventually, one of these insane projects will come to pass – if not this one, then the next. But the downside of any such law is that it will always be doomed to drag behind the times. The IT industry is changing faster than you can imagine, and anything some official may concoct will be years and years behind,” said Levenchuk, who, over the years, proved himself one of the most resolute advocates of unrestrained freedom on the Web. “There’s no point in any laws aimed at “regulating” the Internet, in any sense of the word,” he argued. “You can’t ‘regulate’ technical progress. When you do that, it has a tendency to wind down and stop altogether.”
Although this view typically enjoys popular support in the Russian Internet community, others concede that some regulative action is inevitable. The pressing concern right now can best be summed up by two words: damage control. There is hardly any doubt that a vague or ill-considered law will only muddy the waters further, resulting in numerous problems in years to come. But while many in Russia voice concerns over the possibility of following in the footsteps of its great Eastern neighbor, even some of the more free-range Web users, such as Moshkov, agree there are things in cyberspace that should be regulated.
“Sure, there are certain aspects clearly in need of legislative regulation, and that’s where the government should prove useful,” said Moshkov. “For example, the scales of e-mail spam have already reached such massive proportions as to require measures of a penal nature, not just civil statutes, if we are to stop this flood. These are the issues the lawmakers should address.”
The Federation Council’s standing resolution - to send the bill for revision, making it subject to public discussion - may mollify the alarmist fears of being put on a fast track to China, but as for putting a stop to the seemingly never-ending torrents of e-mail spam, we’ll just have to wait. And wait. Nor will the resolution help curb hacker attacks, copyright violation, extremism and that great bogeyman of concerned parents everywhere, child porn.
Of course, some observers are perfectly happy with things as they are.
“Personally, I believe that the computer revolution hasn’t even started yet. The current Internet scene is nothing compared with things to come,” said Levenchuk. “IT technologies are about to go to the next level - and when they do, no laws will be able to stop them. Until now, all proposed bills on codifying relations within the Russian webspace have simply withered and died. But that’s what I like about life. It doesn’t care about government regulations or laws; it just goes its own way.” |
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