Russia looks abroad for web laws, including to China

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A man looks at an Apple iPhone in a mobile phone shop in Moscow after its official sale started in Russia October 3, 2008. REUTERS/Thomas Peter
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By Maria Tsvetkova and Gleb Bryanski

MOSCOW | Sat Apr 16, 2011 12:09pm EDT

(Reuters) - Russia is looking to the experience of other countries, including China, to "regulate" Internet use, though Moscow has no plans to broaden web censorship, a government spokesman said on Saturday.

Weeks after hacker attacks temporarily closed down the country's most popular blog site, a state tender calling for research into "foreign experience in regulating" the Internet has revived fears that authorities plan to clamp down on Internet freedoms ahead of 2012 presidential elections.

Dmitry Peskov, a spokesman for Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, said the tender was in no way an indication that Moscow wanted insight into Internet censorship.

"It is enough to look at those resources that exist in the Russian Internet to see that there is no censorship there," he said. Peskov said researchers would study best practices in Internet regulation of other countries, including China.

In a country where much media is state-run, the Internet is one of the last bastions of free speech. Russian bloggers freely criticize authorities, often scathingly, question high-level corruption and swap information.

After Russia's main security service said earlier this month that uncontrolled use of Skype and Gmail was a "security threat," Internet users feared that "regulation" may lead to tightening of freedoms on the Web.

"They're trying in their own way, of course boneheadedly, to tighten the screws," an Internet user under the name alekc75 wrote about the government tender on a popular blog.

Security analysts say cyber attacks this month on blogging site Live Journal could be a test drive for closing down web sites, in particular social networking sites, in case of demonstrations ahead of next year's presidential elections.

The Internet has played a crucial role in the unrest that has rocked Northern Africa and the Middle East, prompting some governments to shut it down.

In an interview with the Wall Street Journal in February, Deputy Prime Minister Igor Sechin said Google was responsible for uprisings that helped unseat Egyptian leader Hosni Mubarak.

Ilya Ponomaryov, a member of Parliament and the Duma information committee, said Russia was in a very early stage in developing Internet regulation.

"Our Internet regulation is currently the most liberal in the world because we have none," Ponomaryov told Reuters. He said parliament was now working on amending a series of laws to take into account the rapidly developing Internet.

The Live Journal site was brought down by a denial of service attack -- a tried and tested method of disrupting websites by flooding their servers with requests.

Chechen separatists and the Georgian and Estonian governments have been high-profile victims of similar attacks in the past. Supporters of WikiLeaks also used this method to attack organisations that blocked support for WikiLeaks.

(Writing and additional reporting by Thomas Grove; Editing by Peter Graff)