Mediaboss Marketing

July 12, 2012

Michael Harper for redOrbit.com Your Universe Online

The Russian parliament yesterday unanimously decided to adopt a bill which allows them to exercise a greater control over the Internet. Now, many Russians are worried this is just the first step to widespread censorship by the Russian government.

Only one man stands between this bill and the law: Russias president, Vladimir Putin.

Similar to the Internet protests which occurred when the U.S. Government voted on bills SOPA and PIPA, some Russian websitessuch as search engine Yandex, LiveJournal, and the Russian version of Wikipediaused their sites as a platform to speak out against the new bill. The Russian Wikipedia, for example, went black once more in protest, warning visitors the bill could lead to the creation of a Russian analogue to Chinas great firewall.

The bills authors say the new measures would help crack down on offensive and troublesome sites, such as sites which feature child-pornography or sites which promote drug use and suicide. Should Putin sign this bill into law, the Russian Government would create a sort of federal blacklist for any site which is found to be outside of the regulations. The owners and operators of these blacklisted sites would be forced to take down and remove these sites.

Though this bill was unanimously passed through the Duma, Russias Parliament, the calls of the protestors may have been heard after all. For instance, according to the Guardian, MPs sought out and removed any vague language which could have been used to immediately shut down any site with the ambiguously defined bad content. The Duma instead opted to use more specific language, shutting down sites which contain child pornography, drug use or suicide. Any other site with questionable content would require a court-order before being placed on the blacklist and subsequently removed. If these websites cannot be taken down, the ISPs and hosting companies responsible for the site will be forced to take it down on their end.

Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev backed the law as he spoke to Radio Free Europe.

Peoples basic rights and freedoms must be upheld, including the right to information on the one hand and the right to be protected against harmful content on the other hand.

Those who oppose Putin have long feared that such a crackdown on the Internet could happen and now worry that this bill will be the final stop in between Putin and censorship.

More:
Will New Bill Bring Internet Censorship In Russia?

The Russian legislature's lower house on Wednesday adopted a bill that, according to tech companies in the country, could lead to Internet censorship.

The bill, which includes amendments to several current laws, still needs to be signed and in the meanwhile Russian tech companies continue to protest the legislation, trying to influence the political process before the bill is formally adopted by the upper house.

The bill passed by Russia's lower house, the State Duma, aims to make it easier to block sites that host child pornography, promote drugs or provide instructions about how to commit suicide. But the Russian IT industry sees a basis for Internet censorship because it is unclear how the blocking procedure will work.

The industry is mainly protesting the bill because the State Duma has proposed to block websites through IP and DNS blockades.

Despite approval of the law, Wikipedia Russia, the initiator of the protests that decided to block access to its own site in protest Tuesday, is mildly positive.

"Our protests had an effect," said Vladimir Medeyko, director of the Russian Wikimedia foundation, in an email. Although the protest did not have the same effect as the online upheaval against SOPA in the U.S. (the bill was put on ice), there nevertheless was an impact, Medeyko said.

Even though the bill was passed by the State Duma, several significant amendments were introduced the night before the vote, Medeyko said. The definition of illegal content became much clearer, and the list of authorities who may decide which sites can be blacklisted became shorter, he said. The FSB, Russia's successor of the KGB, and the Ministry of Internal Affairs, were excluded from the list, he said. According to the latest draft of the law, Rostelecom, Russia's state-controlled telecommunications operator, is the only non-government body that can blacklist parts of Russia's Internet, said Medeyko.

In addition, the legislators agreed to include representatives of Wikipedia's parent organization, Wikimedia, in the working group overseeing the bill and its implementations, Medeyko said. This was a breakthrough, he said, since members of the Russian Association for Electronic Communications (RAEC), an NGO that represents the Russian IT industry, were rejected at an earlier stage.

However, representatives from RAEC, and possibly also Wikimedia representatives, are to be included in a working group from the Ministry of Communications and Mass Media that will look at possible amendments to the law, Medeyko said.

He also emphasized that several key state officers, including Russian premier Dmitry Medvedev, explicitly stated that the Internet in Russia will remain "a territory of freedom," he said.

Read the original:
Tech Companies Continue Protests After Russia Adopts Online 'censorship' Bill

Tineka Smith Published 13 July 2012

Russias legislative lower house adopted a new internet censorship bill that will allow the government to shut down any websites that has material it finds offensive.

According to news agency, Ria Novosti, websites that contain drug references, pornography, promote suicide or any ideas that might be "extremist" may be blacklisted.

A blacklist is already running with "extremist" materials banned from courts, some of which even include musical recordings and leaflets. The list has currently has around 1200 entries.

Websites that breach the law would have 24 hours to remove offensive material or face blacklisting. Internet service providers will also have to cooperate in blacklisting sites or they risk being blacklisted themselves.

Julius Genachowski, chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, said in a statement that the bill is taking Russia in a "troubling and dangerous direction."

"The world's experience with the Internet provides a clear lesson: a free and open Internet promotes economic growth and freedom; restricting the free flow of information is bad for consumers, businesses, and societies.

The FCC Chair explained that he had attending the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum in Russia where he met with government officials in talks of expanding broadband access and promoting the Internet as a strong source for innovation, improved public services, and economic growth.

"A free open internet is essential to meeting these goals in Russia, as in all countries," said Genachowski. "Growing economies everywhere promote peace and stability. I believe this legislation will stifle investment in broadband and impede innovations that could advance Russia's promising internet economy."

Some of the most popular websites in Russia like Wikipedia, LiveJournal, and the search engine Yandex, went on strike Tuesday, warning users that their freedom on the Internet was at risk.

Read the original here:
Russian Duma approves internet censorship bill

Endless ink, digital and otherwise, has been spent debating whether Facebook, Twitter, and the rest of the rapidly-multiplying social media ilk are the best or worst thing ever to happen to humankind. Much less has been spent on what it means for markets.

But a recent story about car-pooling apps highlights the fact that modern technology, including social media, has a role to play in making markets more efficient. And since efficient markets are generally a good thing, this counts as a big checkmark in the "plus" column of our calculations concerning the net benefit of social media.

Another big enemy of efficient markets is monopoly power, essentially a situation in which some market actor enjoys a relative lack of competition and hence has the ability to throw its weight around. Social media promises improvements here, too. Sites like Groupon allow individuals to aggregate in ways that give them substantial bargaining power.

The general lesson here is that markets thrive on information. Indeed, economists' formal models for efficient markets assume that all participants have full knowledge-that is, they assume that lack of information will never be an issue. Social networks are providing increasingly sophisticated mechanisms for aggregating, sharing, and filtering information, including important information about what consumers want, about what companies have to offer, and so on. So while a lot of attention has been paid to the sense in which social media are "bringing us together," the real payoff may lie in the way social media render markets more efficient.

More from Canadian Business

See more here:
Social networking's hidden ethical value

A social networking company is not a technology company like Intel is a technology company; its users are its product.

It is easy to forget how high-flying Digg once was. Digg was supposed to be the future of all media, not just social media. People were going to rule the Internet; people were going to curate the web. Down with gatekeepers! But, as many Digg users quickly discovered, new gangs of gatekeepers kept a tight grip on the site's story flow. These guys played the Digg system, often with a mix of social and monetary motives, and Digg never figured out how to incorporate their power users into their community without giving them all the power.

Here was the huge problem with the Digg system. People submitted stories that were nominally voted up or down. But those stories didn't get linearly get more traffic as the upvotes flew. No, you only got a bunch of traffic if the algorithm selected the story and sent it to the front page. This meant that trying to "pop" stories on Digg was like playing NBA Jam with hotspots turned on. The same amount of effort sometimes yielded 12 points and sometimes 2 points and most often 0 points.

The only way to consistently get stuff on the home page was to work at it like a job. And so, some people began to work at it like a job, and then it became their jobs. While some really thought of themselves as an important part of the journalistic enterprise, many others contracted out their services to entities of all kinds. Stripped of any institutional sense of editorial ethics, many Digg power users ended up promoting all kinds of crap along with good stories from legitimate writers and sites.

Meanwhile, everyday users were realizing that nothing they submitted ever even had a chance in hell of going to the front page. They weren't empowered netizens visiting from the future, but chumps who were being played by Digg and a bunch of "social-media consultants."

In short, the community broke. And the community, remember, is also the content machine. Without that, Digg was revealed to be just a bunch of computers waiting for people to add value to the thin offering of a social network. The site still gets a substantial amount of traffic, but that Myspace/Friendster smell of death hangs in the pixels.

There is one clear lesson from Digg's sale: the technology that powered a once-massive social network is worth about $500,000. All the rest of the value derives from the people that use it. Though scaling is tough, any developer in the world can build some profiles and let people connect up. It's an act of genius -- or an act of God, by which I mean luck -- to design a site constitution that makes people want to build their online lives at your URL (or in your app). Social networking companies are not technology companies as much as they are community companies.

To be honest, I don't know why anyone tries to start these things. No one has much of a competitive advantage, the space is crowded, you can't compete on price, and no one wants to join a Reddit for hermit crabs. Then I remember how social networks function: users produce the product and they *are* the product. Now that's some kind of good hustle.

More From The Atlantic

Excerpt from:
The Big Digg Lesson: A Social Network Is Worth Precisely as Much as Its Community