A working group was established by the Information Policies Commission of the Federation Council to begin working on a legal base to control the Russian Internet. Even Dmitry Milovantsev, the Head of the Federal Communication Agency, became part of it. Actually, this is not the first time that the government has tried to come up with laws that would make it possible to do at least something against hackers, spammers, illegal pornographers and other illegal individuals on the Russian Internet. All earlier bills (for example, there was one aimed to introduce censorship for Russian-language web sites) that came from the former Communication Ministry, the Press Ministry, or State Duma deputies, were killed being unable to resist severe criticism of human rights activists and IT specialists.

Yesterday’s decision made by the Federation Council made quite a stir among online mass media, though the members of the newly established working group didn’t say a word about what laws exactly they were going to work out.

Many rights activists considered this news the “network totalitarism” attack, which was quite logical. The Internet appears to be an absolutely uncontrolled technology. For example, anti-spammer laws that have been passed in the USA and the European Union not while ago, are not only criticized for being undemocratic, but also barely work, specialists say.

In fact, the world faces a dilemma now: to either have an incontrollable Internet, or adopt a Chinese-Arab version, where all foreign sites are prohibited, and national web pages are thoroughly censored. No other solution exists even in theory, the newspaper says.