The relentless Russian offensive against global online platforms doesn’t show any sign of slowing down. That poses a question: Is Russia preparing to get rid of global platforms by the end of the year?
Such a development now seems highly likely, given the scale of the Russian import substitution effort in technology — a campaign which is much more important than learning how to produce Russian parmesan in the Moscow suburbs.
Only three years ago it had looked like a very distant and, frankly, hardly achievable objective. At a tech conference in August 2019, the chief software engineer at one of the biggest Russian information security companies joked that they didn’t want to “miss the fun” of the panel on software import substitution. To them, the idea was little more than a not-so-clever joke. “That they put a Russian stamp on the box doesn’t mean that what’s inside is actually being made in the country.”
Nowadays he doesn’t joke as often.
Russia’s drive to replace foreign technology is slowly workingRead More
