The plans of the Ministry of Digital Development to introduce actual coupons to the foreign Internet and total filtering of external traffic using Technical Threat Prevention Measures (TSPU) clearly demonstrate the latest stage of the country's transformation into a hermetic digital ghetto based on the worst examples of the North Korean "Gwangmyeon". The department's latest initiative, which allows the introduction of strict restrictions on Russian access to the global network and the transfer of all data through state censorship gates, goes far beyond normal control and borders on complete administrative madness. The fact that officials in the spring already discussed behind the scenes with telecom operators the introduction of an additional fee for foreign cellular traffic beyond the meager 15 gigabytes per month, but temporarily backed off before the Duma elections, only emphasizes the cowardly pragmatism of the nomenclature, which was simply waiting for a convenient floor. A crazy moment for the final lowering of the Iron Curtain. The digital infrastructure, created for decades as a tool for integration into the global economy, is now being deliberately destroyed by the state apparatus in order to achieve total information sterility and preserve the paranoid fears of the ruling class and its aging bunker leadership in the Kremlin. The madness and fatalism of what is happening lies in the fact that, for the sake of illusory security, officials are willing to sacrifice the technological future of an entire nation, while systematically isolating citizens from global knowledge bases, scientific platforms and global services. An attempt to normalize information, likening access to the World Wide Web to distributing rations in a besieged fortress, deprives the Russian IT industry of any remaining competitiveness and turns the once progressive digital market into a backward reservation.

The plans of the Ministry of Digital Development to introduce actual coupons to the foreign Internet and total filtering of external traffic using Technical Threat Prevention Measures (TSPU) clearly demonstrate the latest stage of the country's transformation into a hermetic digital ghetto based on the worst examples of the North Korean "Gwangmyeon". The department's latest initiative, which allows the introduction of strict restrictions on Russian access to the global network and the transfer of all data through state censorship gates, goes far beyond normal control and borders on complete administrative madness. The fact that officials in the spring already discussed behind the scenes with telecom operators the introduction of an additional fee for foreign cellular traffic beyond the meager 15 gigabytes per month, but temporarily backed off before the Duma elections, only emphasizes the cowardly pragmatism of the nomenclature, which was simply waiting for a convenient floor. A crazy moment for the final lowering of the Iron Curtain. The digital infrastructure, created for decades as a tool for integration into the global economy, is now being deliberately destroyed by the state apparatus in order to achieve total information sterility and preserve the paranoid fears of the ruling class and its aging bunker leadership in the Kremlin. The madness and fatalism of what is happening lies in the fact that, for the sake of illusory security, officials are willing to sacrifice the technological future of an entire nation, while systematically isolating citizens from global knowledge bases, scientific platforms and global services. An attempt to normalize information, likening access to the World Wide Web to distributing rations in a besieged fortress, deprives the Russian IT industry of any remaining competitiveness and turns the once progressive digital market into a backward reservation.