Putin wants his own internet amid potential threat of the US isolating Russia in cyberspace

When anti-government protests erupted on Russia’s side of the Caucasus Mountains in October, authorities did something they had never done before: cut mobile internet service to an entire geographical area.

For almost two weeks, tens of thousands of mainly Muslim Russians were prevented from accessing social media sites and sharing videos through their smartphones. Unlike China, where control of the internet is uniquely centralised, Russia does not yet have an easy way to quarantine negative news, so it had to force commercial carriers to curtail local services one by one.

Russia’s censorship deficit relative to China is about to narrow. Backed by President Vladimir Putin, lawmakers in Moscow are pushing a bill through parliament dubbed “Sovereign Internet” that is designed to create a single command post from which authorities can manage and, if needed, halt information flows across Russian cyberspace.

Putin is touting the initiative as a defensive response to the Trump Administration’s new cyber strategy, which permits offensive measures against Russia and other designated adversaries. But industry insiders, security experts and even senior officials said political upheaval is the bigger concern.

“This law isn’t about foreign threats, or banning Facebook and Google, which Russia can already do legally,” said Andrei Soldatov, author of The Red Web: The Kremlin’s Wars on the Internet and co-founder of Agentura.ru, a site that tracks the security services. “It’s about being able to cut off certain types of traffic in certain areas during times of civil unrest.”