Mr Volodin urged international organizations to design solutions to the problems of Internet development

Vyacheslav Volodin, Chairman of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Collective Security Treaty Organization and Chairman of the State Duma of the Federal Assembly of the Russian Federation, will propose to consider at the meetings of the CSTO Parliamentary Assembly and PACE the measures that “would allow to come closer to solving the problems arising with the development of the Internet.” “These measures must be adequate to the scale of the Internet and its influence,” believes the Chairman of the CSTO Parliamentary Assembly, and “they must be developed jointly at the intergovernmental level.”
Vyacheslav Volodin wrote this today on his Telegram channel, in a publication dedicated to the 30th anniversary of the creation of the Internet.
“30 years ago, on May 17, 1991, the World Wide Web standard – www – was adopted. Many consider this date as the birthday of the Internet,” wrote Mr Volodin.
He recalled the hopes that were associated 30 years ago with the appearance of the World Wide Web. "The emergence of websites and then social networks has become a major factor in the development and transformation of the entire global community. The Internet has become part of our lives. It opened a lot of new development opportunities.”
However, the Chairman of the CSTO Parliamentary Assembly said, “when new technologies were being created that formed the basis of the modern Internet, hardly anyone thought that the web would be used for selling drugs, distributing child pornography, extremist and terrorist information and exerting political pressure. As user base grew, so did the problem.”
“States assess the extent of emerging threats based on their interests and the current situation, guided by the rules, values and morals that exist in society. Relying on self-regulation is a quick and effective way to avoid legislative regulation,” said Vyacheslav Volodin, doubting the effectiveness of this approach, because, firstly, emerging threats in the information society precede the establishment of protection measures against them (in the case of self-regulation as well) and secondly, the Internet is a global network, and patching national “holes” will not eliminate all the possible loopholes. The traces of cybercrime usually lead outside the country where it is committed. This also applies to extremist propaganda and drug sales.
Vyacheslav Volodin mentioned one more important factor that has an extremely negative impact on the current situation: recently some international IT companies have been trying to call the shots in the information space. And the jurisdiction of these companies directly affects their preferences. “We can already see how the foundations on which the global network was originally built are being undermined for the sake of political agenda. The principles of freedom of speech and information are being ignored. At somebody’s will, without any legal grounds, ‘unwanted’ sites are blocked, whose only ‘fault’ is that they express a ‘wrong’ viewpoint. This is unacceptable,” said the CSTO PA Chairman.
“The measures that would allow to come closer to solving the problems arising from the development of the Internet must be adequate to its scale and power of its influence. They must be designed jointly at an international level,” says Mr Volodin. “It would be right for international organizations, first of all, probably, inter-parliamentary ones, to treat this as a priority issue. For our part, we will try to bring up this issue at the session of the CSTO Parliamentary Assembly, propose to consider it at PACE and raise it at international meetings.”