There was a good article in the Financial Times weekend, this past week on new Russian legislation to require data of Russian citizens to be kept in Russia - stored there. This is driving the likes of Google, Facebook and Twitter to distraction and using a term we have not heard often in connection with the Internet: Balkanization. Too late for that; it has already started to happen.
Countries like Syria, China, Iran, and Russia are looking at controlling their own part of the Internet. I was kind of surprised at the number of places that were monitoring the use of the Internet, but not controlling it by clamping down directly. As an example, Syria steals passwords of social media accounts and doesn't bother the users until they find the need. Egypt did the same thing in Mubarak's time, even shutting down the cell network when things got rough.
Russia is passing legislation left and right to clamp down on the Internet and put monitoring devices on every ISP and network service. Now they are asking U.S. companies to store data on Russian systems. On a good day, I doubt that any of these companies have a real good idea of where all that data really is, and even if they did, it is more than a little difficult to manage storage on networks that are geographically bounded. Cloud services balked at keeping data in the U.S. and some government services won't allow storage anywhere else. Balkanization is already going pretty fast, and it is a global phenomena driven by polar opposites, both authoritarian governments and privacy advocates. Imagine that....
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