Kremlin likes to boast that, unlike China, it doesn't censor the Web. That claim always comes with a disclaimer: they don't censor the Web except for a few extremist sites. Apparently, the list of extremist sites is always changing and sites belonging to the shrinking liberal opposition often now make the cut as well. See the
following disturbing item in The Moscow Times:
Moscow-based users of the Yota provider have been unable to access web sites such as Garry Kasparov’s Kasparov.ru, Solidarity’s Rusolidarnost.ru and the banned National Bolshevik Party’s Nazbol.ru over the past few weeks, bloggers and the sites’ editors said.
Access also was patchy until Sunday to the site of opposition magazine The New Times, its web editor Ilya Barabanov said Monday.
Yota denied that it was blocking those sites. But Denis Sverdlov, chief executive of WiMax operator Skartel, which runs the Yota brand, did acknowledge that Yota blocks access to sites that are classified as extremist by the Justice Ministry. Because of that, Yota users cannot open the Chechen rebel web site Kavkazcenter.com.
...Bloggers, meanwhile, are rattled by an audio file posted online Sunday in which a female voice — purportedly of a Yota support representative — says Kasparov’s and Solidarity’s sites are blocked because they are on that list.
And of course, the most surreal thing is that Yota is co-owned by
Russian Technologies, which is itself a state corporation (I've
blogged about Yota's expansion into Latin America - possibly driven by Russia's geopolitical interests - in the past).
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