, a deep-rooted collection of sophisticated digital checkpoints, allows traffic to be filtered with comparative ease. The size of the Chinese market means that indigenous companies, which are open to various forms of control, can successfully fulfil all of their users’ needs. And the state has the resources for a lot of both censorship and surveillance.
Take the technology first—microprocessors, servers, software and the like. Although Russia has some notable firms in these areas—Baikal and Mikron in semiconductors,and Kaspersky in software—for the most part companies and government agencies prefer Western wares.
As in China, Russia is seeing the rise of “super-apps”, bundles of digital services where being local makes sense. Yandex is not just a search engine. It offers ride-hailing, food delivery, music-streaming, a digital assistant, cloud computing and, someday, self-driving cars. Sber, Russia’s biggest lender, is eyeing a similar “ecosystem” of services, trying to turn the bank into a tech conglomerate.
Complementing the firewall are rules that make life tougher for firms. In the past five years Google has fielded 20,000-30,000 content-removal requests annually from the government in Russia, more than in any other country . From this year 13 leading firms—including Apple, TikTok and Twitter—must employ at least some content moderators inside Russia. This gives the authorities bodies to bully should firms prove recalcitrant.
The desire for control also motivated Russia’s leap in payment systems. In the wake of its annexation of Crimea, sanctions required MasterCard and Visa, which used to process most payments in Russia, to ban several banks close to the regime. In response, Mr Putin decreed the creation of a “National Payment Card System”, which was subsequently made mandatory for many transactions. Today it is considered one of the world’s most advanced such schemes. Russian banks use it to exchange funds.
That said, as technology gets cheaper and more openly available, a country like Russia will be able to do ever more with only a modest effort. Stacks are modular; their layers can in principle be swapped out. You do not have to control all of them to get your way. In other words, Russia does not need the latest and smallest semiconductors, say, to build a serviceable edifice on top of what it has; and if it is hard to reach what is available elsewhere, serviceable may be good enough.
Source: News Formal (newsformal.com)
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