Internet and Democratization: The Development of Russian Internet Policy, The

Demokratizatsiya, Fall 2004 by Alexander, Marcus

By 2002, the Russian government saw Internet regulation as a tool for enabling growth of e-commerce and for preparing Russia for entry in the World Trade Organization. Yury Travkin, a consultant to the Duma's commission on information policy, said that the Russian Internet regulation should serve to ban commercial spam e-mail, protect intellectual property, prevent copyright infringement, secure online payments, and legitimize digital signatures.28 The stated reasons for implementing the new legislation were encouraging economic growth and strengthening the country's IT sector. As early as 2000, Interfax was reporting that e-commerce transactions in Russia totaled between US$500 million and US$600 million.29

But one needs to question proposals, such as those reported by the Segodnya newspaper, that in 2001 the Duma's economic policy committee had recommended that only officially registered self-employed businesspeople be able to shop in Internet stores. Timofei Kotonev of the Lovells law firm warned that the 2002 signature law may have required companies wanting to use digital signatures for contracts to register with the Federal Communications and Information Agency.30 At the end of 2001, the Duma was also considering an amendment to the law on trademarks, which would allow companies to strip Internet owners of their Internet domain names if these domains resembled the companies' trademarks. Anyone applying for a .ru domain name would have to go through the Rospatent, the Russian trademark and patent agency. Nikolai Bogdanov, deputy general director of Rospatent, told the Moscow Times: "Usually, the rights of trademark owners to have an individually named product are broken, not the rights of domain holders. No opposite process exists yet." But Anton Nosik, vice president of the Rumbler Internet company, said, "Such amendments are useful for uneconomic purposes, such as the confiscation of property."31

While these discussions were taking place in the Duma, the executive branch pushed for a new and more comprehensive Internet initiative called the Electronic Russia Plan (E-Russia).32 At the July 5, 2001 meeting, the cabinet appointed the Ministry of Communications as a coordinator of the plan, although the official ?-Russia documents still listed the Ministry of Economic Development and Trade as responsible for developing and commissioning the program. The Ministry of Economic Development and Trade was also the one behind the drafting of the document. Tseren Tserenov, the primary coordinator of E-Russia within this ministry, said that ". . . the new economy doesn't just mean getting the Internet to people, but a change in lifestyle and the way government works."33 This statement of E-Russia goals is indicative of the aggressive and far-reaching ambitions of the Russian government to appropriate some of the benefits of the Internet for its purposes (in this case, to stimulate economic growth).

The cost of the program was astronomic by Russian standards, especially for a domestic program dedicated to the IT infrastructure: $2.6 billion. It was partially because of its astronomic size and its complicated intragovernmental funding arrangements that the budget for E-Russia was slashed by the end of 2002. The plan for the funding was that 51 percent of the budget should come from the federal budget, 30 percent from regional budgets, and 19 percent from non-budgetary funds (such as corporate sponsorship). Nearly half of the E-Russia project budget was to come from the federal budget and a third from regional administrators. The bureaucratic machine was not up to the task of mobilizing the kind of management effort needed to gather the allocated money and spend it as it was intended. The strategic vision of the Kremlin suffered, and the limits of government learning and proactive policy came to the fore. In fall 2001, the budget submitted to the State Duma contained a starting amount of $11.9 million, but the amount allocated in 2002 was ten times less than originally proposed.34