Putin's Internet Omen

[Commentary] Russia launched plans to shift control of the Internet to governments and away from today's multi-stakeholders -- developers, engineers and network administrators.

Vladimir Putin's government passed a law this month requiring bloggers and social-media users who have 3,000 or more daily visitors to register with the government and submit to strict speech limits. Global search engines and social media companies must now keep computer records in Russia so that Moscow can search them. The head of Russia's Federal Mass Media Inspection Service, which monitors the Internet, asserted: "Freedom of speech does not mean that everything is permitted." Secretary of State John Kerry called control over the Internet a new battle in which countries supporting an open Internet have a "common responsibility to try to tear down those walls just as it was our responsibility to try to do that during the Cold War." Yet it was the Obama administration that gave Russia the means to build this wall when it announced in March that the US would give up control over the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, known as Icann, and the root zone filenames and addresses of the global Internet. Proposed legislation in Congress would prohibit US surrender of the Internet. The sooner the Obama administration reverses course and agrees to continue U.S. stewardship, the sooner Putin will go back to censoring his own Internet but without the ability to censor everyone else's.