Russian Lawmakers Authorize Creation Of National Messaging Service
By Mike Eckel, Fletcher Alum and Senior News Correspondent at RFERL
Russian lawmakers took a major step toward the creation of a Russian “super app,” passing legislation authorizing the creation of a national instant messaging service.
The State Duma voted on June 10 to set up an official chat platform — “a multifunctional information exchange service” — similar to WhatsApp, the messaging app owned by Facebook’s Meta and used widely in Russia.
The new service would let Russians use it for various bureaucratic or legal purposes, such as signing electronic signatures to legal documents.
The legislation doesn’t specify if the new app should be government-run.
However, the business newspaper Vedomosti in March reported that the social media giant VK, which is essentially Russia’s equivalent to Facebook, was developing a new digital platform called Max. VK is controlled by a Kremlin-friendly oligarch.
Max, the paper reported, would including chat and messaging capabilities, as well as payment services and other applications.
For years, Russian authorities have chafed at the presence, and independence, of major technology and Internet companies like Microsoft, Facebook, YouTube, and similar tech giants, many of which are US-based.
Since the late 1990s, authorities have been building out the technical and legal infrastructure to build what’s known as its own “sovereign Internet,” under tight control and surveillance of Russian regulators.
Regulators have squeezed companies that refused to house their server equipment in Russia itself, and the Kremlin has moved to take control over Russia’s own homegrown Internet companies, like VK and Yandex. Meta, which is the parent company of Faceboook, WhatsApp, and Instagram, has been designated an extremist organization in Russia.
In 2011, the government created Gosuslugi, an e-government service portal now used by an estimated 100 million Russians on a regular basis. Gosuslugi has simplified the lives of millions, streamlining many of the mundane tasks that Russia’s bureaucracies often made intolerable.
In recent years, Gosuslugi has been moving to integrate more of its services into VK. Regulators have used Gosuslugi to warn Russians about platforms like Instagram being blocked — and to encouraged Russians to switch over to VK.
That’s led experts, Russian and Western alike, to conclude that authorities are aspiring to create a “super app” — a single online tool that can be used for personal or professional interactions — not unlike the Chinese app WeChat, which billions of users use on a monthly basis.
At a conference last month, Maksut Shadayev, Russia’s minister of digital development, suggested the new Max app under development could be integrated into Gosuslugi.
At a Cabinet meeting on June 4, President Vladimir Putin endorsed the creation of the new messaging service, ordering officials to “support the Russian messaging platform” and “help shift services currently offered by governmental agencies and financial institutions” to the new platform.
(This post is republished from RFERL.)