The Russian authorities have been on something of a digital crusade in recent years: one based on sovereignty, rather than morality. The latest target, as reported by the Russian business daily Kommersant, is the hugely popular messaging platform Discord, which is estimated to have between 30-40 million users in the country and account for around 4% of the app's traffic.
The opening salvo has already been fired. The Russian state media regulator Roskomnadzor has issued five separate rulings relating to Discord since September 20, which can all now be used as justification for an upcoming ban. Say what you will about authoritarian regimes, but they love their bureaucracy.
Kommersant quotes an anonymous official source as saying the ban is being considered for violations of Russian law: needless to say, these violations have not been detailed, nor are likely to be. They go on to say the ban may happen "in the coming days".
Russian users have also complained about periodic outages on Discord over September, with many resorting to VPNs, and both the web and mobile versions of the platform affected.
Should the ban become a reality, the big losers will be Russian players and developers, with no obvious domestic replacement. "The problem is that for Russian developers, communication with the community, including the international one, and technical support are implemented through Discord," said Vasily Ovchinnikov, head of Russia's Organization for the Development of the Video Game Industry.
Today, a Moscow court fined Discord 3.5 million roubles ($37,675) for, apparently, failing to restrict access to banned information.
So the writing's on the wall, and this potential Discord ban is the latest tech fight picked by the Russian authorities, all of which stems from the 2022 invasion of Ukraine. Since that action, and the subsequent sanctions applied to Russia by the West, the Putin regime has begun seeking "digital sovereignty" through domestic tech companies and platforms that can't simply be shut down by Western companies.
These efforts have taken several forms, from banning VPNs to the possible creation of a national game engine. When the regime has had a little vodka, it's even floated creating a Russian Valve. Amusing as some of this may be, the consequences are anything but: consider Ruwiki, the new self-censoring domestic alternative to Wikipedia that copies over vast swathes of content with all the politically inconvenient stuff silently removed. In Russia, the wiki edits you.
