“This comes within the context of years and years of mounting regulatory pressure on tech companies" in Russia, says Adrian Shahbaz, director for democracy and technology at the human rights nonprofit Freedom House. The country has undertaken a massive effort to reshape its internet toward mechanisms for control , censorship , and mass surveillance . And the government has imposed increasingly strict regulations on domestic tech companies. “They must store data on local servers, provide security agencies with decryption keys, and remove content that violates Russian law," Shahbaz says, though not all companies do all of those things. "And now they’re being forced to promote government-approved apps on their platforms."
The pre-installed apps law came to be known as the "law against Apple," because it essentially dared Apple to pull out of the Russian market entirely rather than change the rules in the company's controlled iPhone ecosystem. Instead, Apple has carved out an exception that others, including Android manufacturers, have not. Google, which develops the open source Android mobile operating system, doesn't manufacture most of that platform's hardware directly, and it doesn't control which apps come pre-installed on third-party devices. (Google does make the Pixel phone but doesn't sell it in Russia.)Mikhail Klimarev, executive director of the Internet Protection Society, a Russian nongovernmental organization, says he believes the pre-installed apps law has a dual function for the Kremlin. It creates an opportunity to promote apps that the country can surveil and control, while also allowing the government to manipulate the tech market. The law will penalize and fine any vendor who sells noncompliant computers and smartphones rather than the manufacturers who made them—unless, of course, the company also sells their products directly in Russia, as Apple does.
“The fact is that the responsibility for the violation is imposed not on the vendor, but on the retailer," Klimarev says. “In this case, the law [will be used] to destroy small sellers. And then the big distributors will raise their prices. In Russia a lot of absurd laws have been adopted lately, which are technically impractical.”The situation with Russia's mandatory apps is not the first time Apple has faced invasive legal requirements from an authoritarian government—nor the first time the company has conceded to these demands. Notably, to continue operating in China, Apple agreed to use a domestic cloud provider to store its Chinese customers' iCloud data and encryption keys. And Apple removes apps from its Chinese iOS App Store when the government demands. The accommodation for Russian apps during setup, though, is a new frontier in Apple's interactions with repressive governments.
“This is part of a broader trend we’ve seen in countries like Iran, Turkey, and India,” Freedom House's Shahbaz says. “Authorities are channeling frustration with popular foreign apps while promoting domestic equivalents where data and speech are more tightly controlled by the government. It’s a bait-and-switch.”
From both an economic and national security standpoint, it's understandable to a degree that governments would want to promote domestic software to their own citizens. But in practice, the internet's growing balkanization is eroding internet freedom worldwide and undermining the entire concept of a decentralized, global web.
