Russia is trying to build its own great firewall
Can its tech industry separate from the West’s?
VLADIMIR PUTIN, Russia’s president, has portrayed his aggression on the Ukrainian border as pushing back against Western advances. For some time he has been doing much the same online. He has long referred to the internet as a “CIA project”. His deep belief that the enemy within and the enemy without are in effect one and the same means that if Alexei Navalny, Mr Putin’s foremost internal foe, uses YouTube—his video of the president’s seaside palace was viewed more than 120m times—then YouTube and its corporate parent, Google, are enemies, too.
This article appeared in the Business section of the print edition under the headline “The Russian stack”
From the February 19th 2022 edition
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