Daily Journal:

The information that Edward Snowden published became a very convenient pretext for Russia to propose new tightening mechanisms regulating the Russian Internet. Now there is an attack on global platforms - Google, Facebook, Twitter - under the pretext of protecting the personal data of Russians. We are talking about an attempt to put these services on Russian territory under the control of Russian intelligence services and to enable Russian intelligence services to gain access to data from global platforms. All this fits into the general trend that began to emerge after the Arab Spring: all this time, Russian intelligence services and parliamentarians were thinking about how to make transparent communications between Russian users of global systems. Now the Snowden story is being used as a pretext to take another step in this direction.

This is about what concerns the internal Russian situation. If we talk about the foreign policy situation, Russia is now trying to re-play the card that it played last December, when it tried to undermine the hegemony of the United States and American services on the Internet. Then Russia lost. Apparently, now the Russian authorities will again try, with the help of strange mechanisms like this attempt at an international investigation, to raise the question that regulation of the Internet should somehow be transferred from the United States to other structures and global services (they are all American and all transparent to American intelligence services ) must begin to cooperate with the intelligence services of other countries. It's clear what this could lead to.

Russia's chances of achieving its goal are not as slim as they seem. Even in December last year, 89 countries had already voted for the Russian proposals, supported by China. Then this initiative was stopped only because Western Europe, the USA and Canada refused to sign up to these proposals. But if even then 89 countries were ready to accept Russian ideas about a sovereign Internet, then I am sure that now there may be more such states. I think that the first country in Western Europe to raise this issue will be Germany. German officials I spoke with about these topics before the data breach scandal said they were not at all interested in cooperating with American intelligence agencies on information security because they feared that all their data would become known to the United States. But then they apparently did not have the opportunity to speak out. Now they have a reason.

By and large, when the conversation is about the fact that one country in the world should not control such a global phenomenon as the Internet, this certainly makes a certain sense. However, the problem is that why it turns out that those states where they talk about this problem the most are prone to repressive methods of suppressing the opposition. Naturally, the opposition in these countries is not very worried about the fact that its correspondence will be transparent or is already transparent to the American intelligence services; rather, it will be afraid of the intelligence services of its own country.