This analysis was first published in SvD Näringsliv, in Swedish, on March 9th, 2022.

To try to block information and news from other countries, Russia is now taking the same path as China. Through censorship and restrictions, a new internet is being built — disconnected from the rest of the world.

If you looked at Russian app stores a month or so ago, it looked like any other country. A few social networks, a couple of messaging services, some shopping apps on the top charts.

Over the weekend, the picture was different. Eight out of 10 of the most downloaded apps were various kinds of VPN services — tools that anonymize your internet usage and can make it look like you’re browsing from another country. VPNs are often used to bypass restrictions individual countries may have set up on the internet.

The top list shows that anonymity and the search for free information is a very live issue in Russia right now. But while the war in Ukraine has brought it to the front, the trends have been in place much longer.

For several years, the Russian state has laid the groundwork for a possible separation of the internet, called the “splinternet”. The term refers to a division of the internet based on technical as well as political and national interests. The best-known example is in China, where the censorship of certain sites and services is usually referred to as “The Great Firewall of China”.

Russia has now set off down the same path as China. In 2019, a “sovereign internet” law was passed, enabling the Russian regime to disconnect from the internet that the rest of the world uses. The stated reason was to be able to protect itself from hackers and the spread of disinformation, but human rights organizations such as Human Rights Watch have warned that the law allows mass surveillance and describe it as a tool for censorship.

Last summer, Russia carried out a successful test with several telecom companies in which it managed to disconnect itself from the internet at large. During the test, it was instead temporarily replaced by a Russian internet called “Runet”. That could be the starting point for a more closed internet, perhaps without any Western tech companies at all.

Several of the tech companies, including Google, Meta and Netflix, have all acted since the war began. They’ve suspended or limited the reach of Russian state-controlled media like RT and Sputnik News. But the suspensions don’t affect Russians themselves — they’re aimed at the outside world’s access to the Russian state’s propaganda. Russia has, on one hand, its own ecosystem of social media with services like VK and Odnoklassniki, and on the other hand, strict requirements on how foreign companies can operate. At the end of the week, Facebook was fully blocked from Russia after a period of conflict around the fact-checking done on some links. Through this, citizens’ rights were being violated, Russian authorities said.

The most important — and most interesting — Western actor is YouTube, visited by 85 percent of Russian internet users. YouTube hasn’t been shut down yet, but a Russian legislator sent a letter last week to Alphabet (which owns YouTube and Google) saying they should “immediately stop distributing false political information” about Russia’s actions in Ukraine.

One guess is that YouTube eventually gets forced out of Russia, as the demands on what material can be published may become too hard to uphold. Perhaps that is also what the Russian government wants to happen? The building blocks for an internet controlled by them are already in place.