Senior Russian MP rules out Chinese-style ‘Great Firewall’
Moscow will not set up a Chinese-style system to police what people do online, Aleksandr Khinshtein, a senior member of the lower house of the Russian parliament, said on Thursday.
Speaking at the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum, the legislator explained that while it is “technically possible” to utilize the Chinese model, Russia does not plan on copying the mechanism dubbed ‘The Great Firewall’ by the Western media.
In use since the 1990s, the system allows Beijing to block access to entire domains and IP address ranges, as well as blacklist certain keywords and phrases to hide search results from users.
“No one is proposing that we separate ourselves from the whole world and use [online] gateways as it is being done in China,” Khinshtein, the chair of the State Duma’s Information Policy and Communications Committee, said. “I’m confident that it will not happen for various reasons.”
The MP added, however, that Russia should use “certain experience” accumulated by China in terms of combating online threats.
Russia has blocked access to Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram after their parent company, Meta, was designated as “an extremist organization” last year. Officials said at the time that Meta had broken national law by failing to remove illegal content.
Khinshtein said it would be “premature” to similarly ban YouTube until Russia makes “a product that can fully compete” with the US-based video-sharing platform. He also argued that Russians were not using VPN technology to view prohibited content “on a massive scale” and that they would not do so in the future.
In 2019, Russia adopted legislation commonly known as the Sovereign Internet Law, which officials said was aimed at ensuring the functioning of the internet in case of a global shutdown or foreign sanctions against the country.
