Sputnik, a State-Owned Search Engine, Is Russia's Latest Threat to Internet Freedom

Over the weekend, Russia's Vedomosti newspaper reported that the state-owned telecom company Rostelecom would launch Sputnik, a new search engine, early next year.

In a fair market, Sputnik stands little chance of denting the market share of either Google or Yandex, a Russian search engine. But as you may have heard, it's not a great time for civil liberties in Russia, and that extends to the Internet. A law passed last year created an Internet blacklist, which was billed as a way to stop the spread of child pornography, drug rings, and other information the government deems prohibited.

So far, Yandex and Google have managed to stay off the blacklist, but seemingly innocuous sites such as Facebook have found themselves—at least temporarily—banned by the government. In September, Facebook was temporarily added to the blacklist after an ad on the site, which advertised weed alternatives, was deemed to violate the country's laws.

Moves such as that have led the blacklist law to be called a "concerted attack on freedom to disseminate information" by Reporters Without Borders. Sputnik might be another move down that path.

But how can the Russian government get people to use Sputnik? It appears Moscow already has a plan in place for its initial set of users: Reuters reports that all Russian government employees may be forced to use Sputnik as their only search engine.

In July, the Centre for Law and Democracy said that Russia's recent attacks on freedom of expression have begun to threaten Internet freedom.

"Although the Internet is famously resistant to censorship or control, Russia’s content regulation framework has tremendous potential to clamp down on online speech,” Toby Mendel, executive director of CLD, said. “We are particularly concerned about moves to ban speech that ‘propagandizes non-traditional sexual relations’ which is clearly targeting the LGBT community.”

Mendel said that there is already "ample evidence" of the overreach by the blacklist law.

Google handles about 90 percent of the world's search traffic, but Russia is one of the few places where it doesn't have a stranglehold on the market. According to StatCounter, a company that measures search engine traffic worldwide, about 51 percent of Russia's searches go through Google, 46 percent go through Yandex.

Other companies have the tables tilted slightly in Yandex's favor. Google has recently expanded StreetView in the country, adding almost 200 cities in March, and it's trying to increase that by the time the Olympics roll around.

Without some behind-the-scenes maneuvering, Sputnik looks dead in the water. But with the mechanisms for censorship already in place, Sputnik could be another tool for Russia to lock down the Internet.