Does Silicon Valley’s new favorite Russian moonlight as Kremlin’s censorship czar?

So while the naive folks in Silicon Valley are singing praise to Digital Sky Technologies (DST), Russia’s new investing behemoth with ambitions of world domination, I bet they have no clue that Kremlin has recently tasked Yuri Milner, DST’s CEO and founding partner, with finding a way to police RuNet and cleanse it of all illegal content.

It’s not yet clear what shape this would take but official sources inside DST say that Milner would work on consolidating the views of Russian Internet Service Provicers into a common position on how to deal with illegal content (see here for a detailed report in Russian).

The most interesting bit in all of this is that Milner – who is also an investor in two of Russia’s most popular social networks, which are, ironically, leading distributors of "illegal content" in Russia, however you define it – has apparently volunteered for the position. Maybe, we should just adopt the Russian approach to content regulation on a global scale and also have Facebook’s founder come up with his own laws for how to regulate his company (and wait, Milner is an investor in Facebook, too – maybe he can help there).

But jokes aside, I actually believe that Milner will be extremely effective in his job – much more effective than the lazy Russian bureaucrats. He may simply need a good excuse to purge his sites of weird, political, and harmful content – and what can be better than given carte blanche by the regime? 

That the Kremlin has a history of recruiting smart Internet talent for their own political agenda is not exactly a secret. What bothers me is that no one in Silicon Valley has the guts to start asking questions about Milner’s role in what would inevitably become a great purging of the Russian Internet. Milner, of course, knows his way around the Internet universe: just this week, he charmed the tech gurus – and even Charlie Rose – with his grand pronouncements that "Facebook Is Going To Be The Social Graph That Unifies All Civilization" (that is, right before it destroys it through some nasty privacy flaw).

But Milner’s high-minded talk is a poor excuse for not challenging the man about his cosy relationships with Kremlin; that a man who – even if somewhat indirectly – controls two of Russia’s most popular social networks and has a stake in Facebook, is trusted enough by the Kremlin to help in their censorship efforts (Milner also sits on one of the presidential commissions) should be a cause for concern, not celebration.

But overall I’m kind of glad that Milner is giving Silicon Valley a rope to hang themselves. Privacy-wise, the only thing worse than Facebook is a Facebook owned by a Russian investor with strong ties to the Kremlin.