Runet globalization, foreign expansion may influence Russian elections' outcome - report
MOSCOW. Sept 27 (Interfax) - The Fund for the Development of Civil Society has presented a report, "Runet Today", expressing concern about the growing foreign influence on the Internet Russian segment. Experts say that may play the decisive role in the Russian parliamentary and presidential elections in 2016-2018.
"The Internet will be the key source of information for Russians within the next few years. This trend acquires particular significance in the context of the political cycles of 2016-2018. If confidence in the Internet as the main source of information continues to grow, the election of the State Duma in 2016 and, especially, the presidential election in 2018 will be held in a new information reality, where the worldwide net will pay the main role," says the report obtained by Interfax.
The Fund for the Development of Civil Society was registered in June 2012 as a non-governmental organization. It is led by Konstantin Kostin, former head of the domestic policy department at the Russian Presidential Administration.
The report indicated the swiftly growing accessibility and spread of the Internet in the past four years, the aging of the Internet audience and the end of the Internet perception as entertainment alone.
The report accentuated globalization of Runet and its negative consequences. It said U.S. services were expanding into the Russian Internet market rapidly.
"As of now, five out of 20 Runet leaders by daily visitors are not originally Russian (Google, YouTube, Wikipedia, Facebook and Twitter). If the trend persists, foreign services may be controlling a large part of Runet within several years. Their servers will be located outside of Russia and registered in foreign domains," the report said.
Foreign expansion into Runet will not be manifested solely with the growing share of foreign services, the report said. U.S. funds and corporations are actively investing in successful Russian Internet companies, and "15 websites on the Russian top 20 have a significant share of foreign capital in them. This share will grow eventually," it noted.
"Many popular Russian services already lie outside of Russian jurisdiction. For instance, the Yandex search engine is registered in the Netherlands, and the biggest social network of Runet, Vkontakte, moved from the Russian domain Vkontakte.ru to the international domain Vk.com," the report said.
"Meanwhile, global social services, primarily Facebook, Twitter and YouTube, become central tools of coordination and mobilization of opposition forces," the report said. "They are being used for the open distribution of extremist and terrorist materials, which is not impeded on principle by the services' administration, and in certain cases, for instance in Egypt, top managers of U.S. Internet corporations even took part in their distribution," it said.
In the opinion of the report authors, many network techniques, which were earlier used in Arab countries, were tested in Runet from winter 2011 to spring 2012. "For instance, people were mobilized for opposition actions with the massive sending of invitations on social networks, there were massive acquisitions of entertainment communities with the goal of their transformation into protest and political ones, and political spam was sent. Most of such actions directly violate the rules of services, but punishment of violators is extremely rare," the report said.