Russia Rolls Down Internet Iron Curtain, but Gaps Remain

Russia is dropping a digital iron curtain over its population, creating a big, new fracture in the global internet—but there are still big gaps in President Vladimir Putin’s efforts to cut off the country from online information accessible in much of the rest of the world. At the same time, more Western companies are pulling back some digital services from Russia under pressure from Western sanctions. It is too early to say how permanent the restrictions will be. But legal experts and digital activists say it already represents a big, new tear in global internet connections, which have been slowly pulling apart under several different pressures—something experts call the “splinternet.” China has a massive censorship and filtering system sometimes called the “Great Firewall.” Iran blocks a large number of foreign media and social-media sites. Turkey and other countries have tried to force social-media companies to remove content they find objectionable through tough local laws. In Western countries, too, new laws requiring companies to store data locally and rules on the removal of certain types of content have erected digital borders where none had existed before. “The war has taken existing trajectories and catalyzed them,” said Daphne Keller, a former associate general counsel at Google, who now directs the platform-regulation program at Stanford University’s Cyber Policy Center. “Russia is isolating itself on purpose in some really dramatic ways.”