Denis Davydov: In the struggle for Internet sovereignty, Russia won
Breaker War
How were positions divided at the conference and where did abstentions come from?
- I must say that many of the 15 abstentions did not sign the new rules, because they did not have such powers. Say, India would be in favor, but it simply had no right to sign this document. In fact, and this can be argued boldly, support for the new regulations was provided by everyone except the United States and their satellites. For the first time, we saw how the countries of the Asia-Pacific region, Africa, South and Central America vote together with Russia - all together and together. Europe and North America were in the minority.
Many said before the conference that “Russia remained isolated”, “Russia and six other countries made amendments that violate the rights and freedom of a person to have access to information.” In fact, this is certainly not the case, and this is a brilliant victory of the Russian Federation in the international arena, including the diplomatic one. The most surprising thing is that, judging by the negotiations that preceded the vote, this victory did not happen thanks to, but in spite of.
How so?
- We see the failure of the Russian communications administration, which was supposed to prepare the ground, carefully make these proposals, form the information space for these innovations. None of this has been done. If we look at the list of voters, then most of our colleagues in the Regional Commonwealth in the Field of Communications (RCC), that is, those with whom our Ministry of Communications communicates, are the administrations of communications of the CIS countries. They voted either against or abstained.
That is, Russia could not convince its colleagues in the post-Soviet space to vote correctly. And this is despite the fact that the position of many countries - like in Tajikistan, where social networks were banned the other day - has the support of our initiative. Nevertheless, on such an important treaty, their voices did not sound in our favor. This became possible only because the Russian communications administration did not carry out any work in this direction.
Nevertheless, the adoption of the new regulations is really a victory. The status quo does not suit most of the countries that were waiting for someone of Russia’s scale to make a well-developed proposal. In fact, we had to lead all those who were somehow interested in change, but could not afford to speak. Another detail. When the United States realized that they would vote against it, and everyone understood that they would vote against it, the Americans began to take time to the last, so the technical possibility to hold a closed ballot, preparation for which takes longer, was lost. If the vote were closed, many US allies and satellites would have voted as they themselves would have considered necessary, and this would strengthen the Russian position. Despite this, even in open voting, some traditional US allies supported Russia. As everyone understands: these are only attempts to keep a switch.
How much is the switch in the hands of the United States? Considering that now the regulatory functions on the Internet are in the hands of a conglomerate of American NGOs and private organizations - whose decisions are more powerful?
- Those who voted for, will live on a new contract. Those who are against will live under the Melbourne Treaty of twenty years ago, in which the Internet is not regulated at all. The final version of the modern document was developed including taking into account the wishes of the United States, but it contains several provisions that are essentially revolutionary. The United States made serious efforts to ensure that these proposals either did not appear or appeared distorted, but they did not succeed.
Regarding regulatory functions, they will not enter into force before 2015. In terms of network addressing and the distribution of network addresses and domain names, this will all remain in the US business. Well, what can I do if, historically, this is entirely their sphere. On the other hand, in terms of blocking access to undesirable content, in terms of filtering, new powers have appeared in countries. All states understand that these issues can and should be addressed at the national level. But common principles will now be developed at the supranational level at the UN level.
By the way, the United States cannot simply take and leave the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), they will have to explain their position. But if Russia and those 88 countries also present their position from the UN rostrum and show the citizens of other countries what they stand for, then our allies will become even bigger, and in the end we will come to the conclusion that the United States will remain isolated and forced make these decisions, because they will not have a reasonable argument.
About Russian Internet censorship
... We are constantly intimidated by the violation of human rights. I personally do not observe any violation of human rights on the Internet. Since we are on the Internet every day and monitor, we understand how it really works - after all, we, in fact, were one of the initiators and one of its main developers - the law on the registry of prohibited sites. We see what is happening on the Internet and info space. And there is a very concentrated impact on the information field and the artificial formation of opinions in it, which, let's say, is not in the interests of the Russian people.
But this is one aspect. Another thing that can not be overlooked is the corruption of both children and adults. This is a large amount of pornography, including child. We fought with the latter and defeated it, driven it underground and eliminated several groups that were engaged in its manufacture and distribution. The same with drugs: before the register of prohibited sites on the Internet, it was possible to find and purchase any drugs, read about the methods of production and cultivation of drugs. Now this is no longer. Naturally, earlier, as soon as the Russian Federation began to react and try to protect its citizens, everyone immediately accused her of violating the rights to freedom of speech and free access to information. But it is suicide to have access to information that destroys a person. It's like coming to the factory of poisons and breathing them.
But here immediately there is the problem of abuse and excesses. What is the guarantee that the league will not turn into a tool for settling accounts between online communities? Will not try to take control of uncomfortable resources?
- We need public control. We do not reinvent the wheel, especially with square wheels. We see what evolutionary path the entire civilized world has gone through, where the Internet appeared earlier than in Russia, and we see forms and methods of state control, public control. The same registry ... in fact, there is practically the same thing with national peculiarities in any self-respecting country. Some countries have filtering or blocking. There are no laws, but there is filtering.
Simply, it is supposedly voluntary, as in Germany, where such voluntary agreement between providers is in force. In fact, they were collected and told - guys, you enter into a voluntary agreement that you will not give users access to child pornography or Nazi content sites. And all voluntarily agreed. This is not prescribed by law, but filtering is done.
When the Russian Federation announced about the same thing that we also want to bring order in our information system, we were immediately accused of violating human rights. And naturally, they said about abuses - you have corruption in the country. And when we answer that, for example, the UK has the same scheme and it works - we were told: “Well, in the UK 500 has been democracy for years, and you, roughly speaking, with your pig snout, want a Kalashny series”. That's what they said. Because Europeans are people of the first grade, and you, Russians, people of the second grade, and you are simply incapable of it. As in the USA it was believed in the 40s that blacks do not see in the dark, the same opinion is in relation to Russia.
Therefore, the very fact of the emergence in Russia of such a law and the right to regulate the Internet at the national level was the first step towards building information sovereignty. Now the main task is to strengthen this sovereignty.
How do Russian kiberdruzhiny
How is the communication of the league with social networks, the main repository of illegal content?
- League kiberdruzhinniki carry out a voluntary moderation of social networks, photohosting, file hosting. We have an agreement with VKontakte and have the opportunity to remove child pornography from this network if it suddenly appears there. Independently, that is, we have direct access to delete information, and we interact with this network quite effectively. We can say that we cleaned it of child pornography. Looking at what was happening in 2011, it was a terrible problem.
I am sure that social networks should remain as such and change in accordance with the requests of our citizens. And citizens' requests are calm communication, without dirt, without pornography, dismemberment and other annoying content. Listening songs, watching movies, chatting with friends is a normal request that needs to be protected.
How to deal then with provocations, attempts to throw in illegal content in order to use the law to settle accounts?
- The model of the law is such that it gives enough time to the provider or hoster to sort out the situation and remove the content from the site. This is given for two days, and if we look at the site owners, the main Russian social networks react within 5 minutes. Heavy overseas services, their response time is longer, around 8 hours. At least, no one pulls up to two days and does not wait. Many say, and suddenly the site was hacked and placed pornography there. First, if the site is hacked, there is no point in posting pornography there.
You can after all try to defame or substitute, so that the site is closed.
- If the site has been hacked, you can close it after all.
And if illegal content is posted for political purposes?
- It is also meaningless, because the law just has protection against conscious attempts to block any resource on these grounds. The law has a pronounced preventive nature - many resources, where materials on drugs and suicides used to occur, the same pornography, cleared themselves of this content and remained afloat. No one has closed them, and all citizens of the country have felt this effect, because such information has become less.
Since September 1, it has been possible to close sites that are outside of Russia. Up to this point, only those sites under Russian jurisdiction where physical hosting was hosted on the territory of Russia were under Russian jurisdiction. With regard to them, the Russian Federation could still do something, and if they were somewhere in the Netherlands, nothing can be done. Now you will, such an opportunity has appeared all over the world. At the same time, there is no difference whether it is in the .ru zone or not, access to it can be closed upon the fact of a complaint about the content and if the provider refuses to respond.
The end of the anonymus era
What is the position of the league on the issue of limiting anonymity on the Web and the global identification of users proposed by Arab countries?
- We did not articulate our position on this topic, but we believe that there should be no anonymity on the web. However, it is still not present as such, because the state and law enforcement agencies are fully equipped to establish the identity of the offender on the Internet. That is, it is not a direct de-anonymization, it is mediated. If someone commits an offense, you can understand who he is, where he is, where he committed a crime, take action, and it works now. It’s probably unwise to enter the social network on a passport, and an additional restriction of anonymity, in our opinion, is unnecessary today.
On the other hand, if a citizen wants to receive public services on the Internet, communicate with the state, enjoy civil rights, he should at least introduce himself. Let's say that this is a specific Ivanov Ivan Ivanovich from Tambov, who expresses his position or collects 100 thousand signatures for the initiative to become federal and be considered by the Duma. Any citizen who comes to taste, he will understand - it is convenient. No need to hide or hide anything. We do not walk the streets of citizens who say that their name is Vasya, but in fact they are Petya.
Although there are some.
- Yes, there are such, but such a minority. If such people appear, there arise fair doubts or concerns that a person has something to hide, he is up to something.
Searches on the "black internet"
The League has developed some automatic systems for processing content, which were transferred to Roskomnadzor. Does this mean that the main work to identify illegal content will fall on the shoulders robots?
- Systems that have been transferred to Roskomnadzor, allow only to analyze and process incoming messages. Most of the information they receive automatically. But in order to find banned information on the Internet, all, wherever it is on the World Wide Web, we create a search engine. Search engine bad content. That is, it is the same Yandex or Google, only to search for all the bad. We plan to connect voice recognition and video recognition modules to it. Then it will be a powerful tool to find everything bad. Then we will understand in general how much of this is on the Internet. Now there are only relative expert estimates. We know, for example, that 70% of videos downloaded over the Internet are adult videos. Nobody truly knows how much prohibited information is on the Internet, so we create a search engine that will allow it to be found, and later it will make it easier to block and cleanse it.
We have to go this way fairly quickly, because the Internet is becoming more popular than TV and has an impact that is incomparable with other media. Effect on consciousness, its formation. If we have streams of impurities there, then the corresponding consciousness. Therefore, it must be cleaned, and people are ready for this. We conducted quite a lot of sociological polls, of the order of 77%, and this is a large figure, stand for decisive measures to restore order on the Internet. People are tired, parents are afraid that children will face destructive sects, drugs, and they are not able to resist this alone. They want someone to take this burden off of their shoulders and take up this, and it’s good if this is a strong Russian state that has historically taken care of its citizens. And why should it stop doing this?
Why all this time only American and British, non-Vietnamese and non-Brazilian Internet companies that work in Russia constantly say “no, this should not be a concern of the state, let people worry, parents themselves think how to protect their children” ? Let us then everyone will think about how to protect everyone himself, disband the army, the police, and eliminate the firefighters.
"Black Yandex", obviously, is intended for official use. What can the league offer to the end user of the Internet? Does cooperation with developers of popular browsers develop? Will league plug-ins be offered for them?
- Yes, we have applications for all popular browsers with the ability to instantly report dangerous content. Previously, we had such an opportunity on the website of the Safe Internet League, where there was a banner "report about dangerous content."
People who met advertising, cruelty, violence, drugs or illegal banner, went there and reported, but for this it was necessary to go to the league site, open the form, write ... For many, this was not entirely acceptable, because it required extra effort. Our people are accustomed to a certain comfort, and not everyone wants to move once again.
So our warriors and activists send messages directly from the browser with one button, without leaving the window where the person found the malicious content. We have all these applications available for download on our website, for example, on my computer, this is also installed.
Who will be the main censor of the Runet
How does the league plan to interact with the official authorities? Where is the boundary between the powers of the league and Roskomnadzor?
- Roskomnadzor interacts with the carrier, with the hosting provider. The Internet Safe League now provides expert support. We have developed software, we are further concentrating on its development, and we hope to create a perfect software tool for searching, filtering and blocking illegal content.
Roskomnadzor, Rospotrebnadzor and Federal Drug Control Service carry out the decision-making function regarding information that ordinary citizens, our warriors and these departments themselves find. We provide them with assistance in conducting examinations, because we have an Expert Center, which makes a collective decision whether the information contains signs of pornography or a call for suicide, etc. Accordingly, we are building partnerships with these central bodies and we understand that this is a state task.
Initially, we proposed Roskomnadzor to become the body that regulates the registry of prohibited sites, but then for some reason some market participants began to say that “this should not be the state”, and so the “registry operator” appeared in the law. Now we understand that Roskomnadzor is doing an excellent job with the task, and this is not only our opinion, it is shared by industry experts and organizations in the field of Internet business, the same RAEC, the largest telecom operators. This is a consolidated opinion regarding the fact that Roskomnadzor should perform this task, because he has already taken on it, he succeeds in doing this and no one will do this work better than him.
That is, the league positions itself as a research institute, and not a control tool?
- In general, when we talk about public control, we understand that it should be public control over the activities of government. That is, the process is this - the state created the rules of the game and told you what to do. Further, the state and business are determined how to do it, and then they each begin their activities.
At the same time, the state controls the business, and society controls state institutions and bodies in terms of transparency and respect for the interests of society. That is what we mean by public control. Rumors that "the league was trying to gain control over the Internet industry" ... if the league was created to gain control, we would have received this control a long time ago. Since these tasks have not been set before us and will never be set, these are all just scarecrows and horror stories.
Of course, gradually the state should solve a greater number of issues, including in the Internet sphere, but this is a subject for a separate discussion.
Help
The Safe Internet League is the largest and most reputable organization in Russia created to combat dangerous content on the World Wide Web.
The goal of the league is to eradicate dangerous content by self-organizing the professional community, participants of the Internet market and ordinary users. The Internet Safety League includes leading telecommunications operators, IT companies, Internet resources and public organizations.
The League was created with the support of the Ministry of Communications of the Russian Federation. The Board of Trustees of the League is headed by Assistant to the President of the Russian Federation Igor Schegolev.
Founder of the Safe Internet League - Charitable Foundation of St. Basil the Great.
Help
The conference of the International Telecommunication Union at the UN ended in Dubai December 17. During the conference, Russia, Iran and China offered to introduce the possibility of "sovereign control" of the Internet for individual countries. The US and the EU have insisted on maintaining the status quo, in which the conglomerate of American organizations actually has the main authority over the World Wide Web. The final documents oblige Internet service providers around the world to install Internet traffic analysis systems to block “undesirable” content, including torrent traffic and de-anonymization of users. In addition, the ability of national regulatory organizations to block inappropriate content is being expanded.
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