When he's not checking Gmail on his MacBook, Vladimir Putin's new
Internet czar can't stop railing against American technology companies.
Google, Apple and Microsoft, collectively worth more than Russia's gross
domestic product, have all entered German Klimenko's crosshairs since he
was named Putin's first Internet adviser six weeks ago.
In a
90-minute interview peppered with expletives, Klimenko said forcing
Google and Apple to pay more taxes and banning Microsoft Windows from
government computers are necessary measures best explained in terms of
barnyard economics and marital infidelity.
"We are breeding the
cow and they are milking it," Klimenko, who hasn't had time to move into
his Kremlin office, said in Moscow at the headquarters of his Internet
group, which includes blog-hosting and statistics services.
Klimenko,
49, is pushing to raise taxes on US companies to help level the playing
field for Russian competitors such as Yandex and Mail.ru. His efforts
mirror those of governments across Europe and beyond to squeeze more
revenue out of Google, Apple and other multinationals with increasingly
complex billing and ownership structures.
The Putin adviser
already has an ally in parliament: Andrey Lugovoi, one of two former KGB
officers accused by a U.K. judge of assassinating former agent
Alexander Litvinenko, a vocal Putin critic, in London in 2006.
Lugovoi,
who became a lawmaker after Litvinenko's poisoning and denies
wrongdoing, is sponsoring a bill that would apply an 18 percent
value-added tax to as much as 300 billion rubles ($3.9 billion) of
revenue that Google, Apple and other foreign companies earn each year.
The
bill lists a dozen categories of digital products and services on which
domestic companies currently pay VAT but foreigners for the most part
don't, including ads, games, movies, marketplace transactions and cloud
computing.
"When you buy an app from Google Play or the App Store
anywhere in Europe, VAT is charged at the place of payment, but not here
in our banana republic," Klimenko said.
The proposed amendment to
the tax code is one of scores being debated by lawmakers seeking new
sources of revenue to plug the biggest fiscal deficit in six years.
Plunging oil prices and sanctions over Ukraine have helped prolong the
worst recession since Putin came to power in 2000.
But the Kremlin's issues with Silicon Valley go much deeper than finances.
In
a country where the president has called the Internet a "CIA project,"
suspicion runs deep that US companies do the bidding of their government
every bit as much as their shareholders.
Google, for example,
which can track "everything," responds to 32,000 requests a year from US
law-enforcement agencies but it won't answer one from Russia, according
to Klimenko.
"We have to consider this as a kind of potential threat to our national security," he said.
Google, Apple and Microsoft all declined to comment.
After
returning to the presidency in 2012 amid the largest protests of his
rule, Putin moved to tighten his grip over the Internet in much the same
way he brought television stations and newspapers to heal in his first
two terms.
He signed a law allowing authorities to shut down sites
for hosting content loosely defined as "extremist" and introduced new
restrictions on blogging that forced popular writers to register with a
watchdog. Putin also wants Internet companies to store all the personal
data they collect on Russian users on servers located inside the
country.
Microsoft, Google and other US companies "reached the
point of no return" when they complied with sanctions over Putin's
annexation of Crimea by halting all business with the peninsula,
according to Klimenko. As a result, it's "inevitable" Russia will switch
state networks from Windows to an open-source system based on Linux, a
move 22,000 municipal governments are prepared to make immediately, he
said.
"It's like a wife seeing her husband with another woman he can swear an oath afterward, but the trust is lost," Klimenko said.
With
relations with the West at a post-Cold War low and few signs of
improvement on the horizon, Putin's new adviser said Russia will
continue to erect barriers in cyberspace.
"The way it's done in
North Korea or China with its firewall probably doesn't fit us, but it's
only a matter of time," Klimenko said. "It won't be fatal if Google
leaves Russia Yandex and Mail.ru have similar technologies."
© 2016 Bloomberg L.P.