Paul
Goble
Staunton, February 5 – Today, the
international human rights group Agor released its annual report on the state
of Internet freedom in the Russian Federation in 2018. That state is not good. It
said that the authorities engaged in 662,842 specific moves to limit free
access, up from 115,706 in 2017.
Two-thirds of the restrictions this
year involved limiting access by blocking sites. Most of the other third concerned
the prohibition of various kinds of information that Russian government
agencies and courts have banned in the country (agora.legal/news/2019.02.05/Doklad-Agory-662-842-fakta-ogranicheniya-svobody-interneta-zafiksirovany/883).
Not only did the total number of
such interventions increase for the Russian Federation as a whole, but the
number of regions where Agora judges the situation to be serioius increased
from 26 in 2017 to 41 in 2018, a continuation of a trend the monitoring group
has pointed to in each of the last four years.
But if that was a continuation of
earlier trends, there was a new development this year which the authors of the
Agora report suggest indicates that the future may be even worse for those who
seek to use the Internet.
That development is this, the
authors say, “having recognizing that blocking at the level of Internet
providers is ineffective and recognizing the reputational risks which mass
criminal persecution of ordinary users entail, the Russian powers that be hope
to control the internet” in a different way.
They want to force the major
services to cooperate and thus monopolize the market of access to the
Internet. That means, the report says,
that Moscow and its representatives in the region will be using these new means
more than some of the old ones, possibly allowing Moscow to claim it is
liberalizing when in fact it is continuing to crack down.
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