Runet gets a new boss: The Bell exclusive

The key marketable signal is not “more censorship” but a regime change in execution: when enforcement shifts from bureaucratic regulation to a security-service mandate, the slope of repression steepens and reversals become much less likely. That matters because the primary economic damage is now second-order — higher customer-acquisition costs, lower ad monetization, and more churn for any consumer internet business that depends on persistent engagement and low-friction payments. The immediate losers are platforms with large mass-market user bases and firms selling digital ads or mobile services into a more fragmented, less reachable audience.

The bigger spillover is to the local tech stack around circumvention and compliance. VPN, DNS, proxy, and endpoint-security demand should stay elevated for months, not days, because users do not abandon access habits once they’ve been forced to route around controls; they harden them. That creates a durable benefit for foreign privacy tools, enterprise security vendors, and cloud/network infrastructure names that sell “resilience” rather than pure connectivity, while domestic telecoms face a lose-lose: more capex for filtering, more political blame for outages, and no ability to price through the friction.

The political read-through is more important than the internet read-through: declining approval alongside visible, daily inconvenience raises the odds of an eventual tactical easing, but only if the enforcement machine starts generating elite pushback or measurable macro damage. Absent that, this is a classic ratchet — short-term noise can reverse a specific block, yet the institutional winner remains the security apparatus. The contrarian point is that the crackdown may be overestimated as a direct GDP shock and underestimated as a medium-term productivity tax: the first-order hit is manageable, but the cumulative effect is lower business velocity, weaker consumer time allocation, and more capital flight into offshore or gray-market digital channels.