Russia is beginning to enforce a law that will give the state control over blogs. Any blog with more than 3,000 visitors a day must register with the government, providing the true identity of the owner and operator of the blog. Russia already has a bunch of laws allowing the government to punish misbehaving journalists (who say anything the government does not like.) While there are many ways Russian bloggers can get around this new censorship that may not be necessary. Blogging is being replaced by other forms of social media. That, and the availability of so many Internet tools to get around censorship attempts make the latest government ploy more of an annoyance than a step towards effective censorship of the web.
As China, which has far more resources devoted to Internet censorship, has discovered that once you have the Internet you cannot shut down the flow of information. You can’t stop the signal. China also has far stricter press censorship than Russia and still the government has been unable to stop harmful (to the government) news from getting to the Chinese people, often coming from other Chinese via the Internet.
… Russians had become the most energetic social networking users on the planet, spending twice as many hours (as the world average) on blogging and other social networking activities. The 2011 DDOS attack may have come from Russian hackers angered at apparent government efforts to censor what appears on Russian websites. The government won’t admit to actual censorship, but there were growing incidents of anti-government items not showing up after posting, because of mysterious (and seemingly bogus) “technical issues.” Since the government depends on the Internet a lot to maintain control of the public opinion, the DDOS attack is believed to be a warning that there are many Russians capable of shutting down government Internet operations.