Putin can sleep soundly, thinking his interests on the web are safe

Anton Nosik, one of the Sup execs, predicted in his interview with Esquire magazine that by 2010 Russia will have 40 million Internet users, while the total number of Russian-speaking web surfers will be 70 to 80 million. Most of the growth should come from users in Russia, Belarus, and Ukraine. Nosik also predicted an impending demise of ICQ and iTunes in the Russian market. Russian-speaking users are now migrating to Gtalk, which supports the open Jabber standard and a multitude of clients. It also stores the message history on a centralized server. As for iTunes, its future is threatened by a more flexible demand management rather than continuing high prices for recordings. Nosik thinks that the Chinese model of Internet censorship is no threat to Russians, since back in 1999 Russia's President Vladimir Putin scrapped a bill that, if signed into law, would introduce mandatory licensing of new Internet media with the Ministry of the Press, while those already existing in the .RU zone would be expropriated and used at the ministry's discretion.