Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
diminishing, digital divide (Lupaˇ and Sladek
2008
). With assistance from the
United Nations, Poland launched Internet Republic, a project aimed at facilitating
internet access in rural areas. Broadband in the country, roughly 17 %, is among
the lowest in Europe. Hungary's urban-rural schism is the dominant feature of its
digital
divide,
and
the
government's eHungary
Program,
launched
in
2003,
trumpeted internet access in the schools and 3,000 public access points.
2.4.3 Russia
In Russia, the internet began in the early 1990s to serve large financial institutions;
the growth in individual and residential users occurred only after the banking crisis
of the late 1990s, when a series of regional data transmission nets popped up
(Perfiliev
2002
). However, in the mid-1990s, O'Lear (
1996
) found Russian envi-
ronmentalists using e-mail to network and share information. By 2011, with a
44 % penetration rate, roughly 61.5 million netizens lived in the country. Access
to the internet, however, is socially and spatially uneven, often slow, and subject to
severe political oversight. In Russia, many inter-city communications networks
still rely heavily on copper cable wires, when most of the world's telecommuni-
cations traffic has moved decisively into fiber optics cable. As in many countries,
Russian internet use has been concentrated in the largest cities, particularly
Moscow and St. Petersburg. A persistent rural-urban divide remains however:
''Private providers have not developed outside of large cities not only because of
the lack of advanced telecommunications infrastructure and high construction
costs, but also because potential markets of regular internet users remain very
small'' (Perfiliev
2002
, p. 419).
In a country where newspapers, television, and radio stations are already under
tight government control, the Russian internet has emerged as the last bastion of
relatively uncensored speech. The Putin government gradually sought to extend its
influence over the internet, essentially following the Chinese model of granting the
secret service extensive monitoring powers, ostensibly on the grounds of fighting
corruption (Troianovski and Finn
2007
). As Russia's penetration rate increased,
threatening to broaden the sphere of public debate and give rise to autonomous
voices, the administration responded by purchasing independent websites, pro-
moting pro-government websites, and fostering a network of government-friendly
bloggers. Russia's internet surveillance law, the System for Operational-Investi-
gative Activities, allows state security services unfettered physical access to
internet service providers and requires them to report statistics about users.
