You'll be able to pay your taxes. You'll be able to share, and like, cute cat videos. You'll be able to enroll your child in kindergarten. You'll be able to instant-message friends, pay a traffic fine, stream music, find a partner for business, romance, and more -- or be summoned to fight in the war in Ukraine.
All in one place, with just a couple clicks on an app on your iPhone or Google Pixel phone.
What could go wrong?
It's called a super app. China already has its own, called WeChat. And it appears Russia will have one, too -- very soon.
For years, Russian authorities have been building new infrastructure and guardrails around the country's once freewheeling, vibrant digital universe, using hardware, software, legal threats, and corporate takeovers to build what's known as a sovereign Internet.
The full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 further hastened this effort, which includes the imminent dismantling of one of the country's most admired Internet companies, Yandex.
Now authorities are quietly creating another tool that activists and experts say will give officials greater ability to surveil and monitor Russian citizens -- and to censor and manipulate information online.
"Unless the only objective they have is to improve the lives of their citizens, to make it so convenient and easy, which obviously would be a noble cause, the only obvious other reason is…to have control over the data," said Philipp Dietrich, a program officer at the German Council on Foreign Relations and author of a recent report on Russia's effort to exert more control over the Internet.
"For any authoritarian state, that's the absolute dream scenario," he told RFE/RL.
"We've been hearing these fantasies for a long time," said Sarkis Darbinyan, a legal expert on cyber policies at the Russian advocacy group Roskomsvoboda. "And, of course, the Russian authorities would like to have one entry point into all social networks, instant messaging services, and to do it through a state account. And now, due to the 'sovereignization' of the Internet, it's all now happening very quickly."
"Indeed, I think people don't really understand this. And this is a problem," he said. "Many people still do not understand the actual value of protecting personal data."
System for Operative Search Activities
Russian authorities' efforts to get a tighter grip on the Internet date as far back as the late 1990s, with the development of something called the System for Operative Search Activities.
Known by its Russian acronym SORM, the system involved mandatory installation of special devices by all Internet service providers, allowing the country's primary domestic intelligence agency, the Federal Security Service, to vacuum up and monitor anything floating around the Russian Internet.
The system was expanded and advanced over subsequent years, making it easier for the state to thwart various privacy security or encryption measures. Developments also included things like "deep packet inspection," which allows for monitoring technical data and network information.
In the late 2010s, the Kremlin-controlled parliament passed a series of laws requiring major Internet companies like Google, Facebook, and Apple to house their servers on Russian territory, making it easier for authorities to control or monitor traffic.
In 2019, lawmakers adopted legislation aimed at what they called the "safe and sustainable functioning" of the Internet. The law broadened the ability of the country's technical regulator, Roskomnadzor, to blacklist and block websites and go after tools that help people get around blockages, called virtual private networks, or VPNs, which shield a user's identity and location.
It also broadened Roskomnadzor's ability to slow down, or "throttle," data flowing to and from websites or apps, making them nearly impossible to access. And it set up a specialized entity within Roskomnadzor charged with searching for online threats.
In March 2021, regulators throttled social media giant Twitter, now known as X, after the company refused to take down posts it deemed contrary to Russian regulations. It was the "first ever use of large-scale targeted throttling for censor ship purposes," according to a paper by U.S. and Russian academics published later that year.
The effort backfired, however, when Internet users across Russia complained that a large number of sites, including the Kremlin's main website and other government pages, had stopped working.
Nine months later, regulators ran a bigger test, seeking to effectively unplug Russia from the global Internet, a test the deputy communications minister declared a success.
Exit Yandex. Enter VK.
Russian authorities also moved to rein in some of the country's biggest and most successful Internet companies.
Yandex had grown beyond its search engine, which was dominant inside Russia, expanding into realms including e-commerce, maps, music streaming, ridesharing, food delivery, and robots.
In 2019, after months of pressure, Yandex agreed to a major restructuring that dramatically increased government oversight -- and also blocked any future efforts that would potentially put it under foreign control.
After the invasion of Ukraine, Yandex effectively began censoring news about the war, tweaking its algorithms and drawing information for its popular News portal from authorized Russian news sources.
Months later, the company sold off two of its main news and entertainment portals to another major Internet company, formerly known as Mail.ru and now called VK.
Yandex, whose corporate headquarters has long been in the Netherlands, has struggled to reorganized itself under a plan that would basically split it into a Russian entity and a foreign company. Those efforts are now foundering, with reports saying the Dutch entity couldlose complete control of the Russian Yandex assets.
VK, by contrast, is thriving.
'One Domestic, Controllable Social Network'
Originally under the corporate umbrella of Mail.ru, VK, which was later adopted as the holding company's name, was essentially taken over in 2014, when its founder, Pavel Durov, was pushed out. Kremlin-connected tycoon Alisher Usmanov became the largest shareholder.
In 2021, VK Company was restructured in a complicated deal that ultimately handed a majority stake to a new entity called MF Technologies. That entity, in turn, is controlled by state-run conglomerate Rostec, state-controlled natural gas giant Gazprom, and an insurance company controlled by Yury Kovalchuk, a close ally of President Vladimir Putin.
The new chief executive officer became Vladimir Kiriyenko, the son of a senior Putin aide and a former board chairman at state telecommunication company Rostelecom. A relative of Kovalchuk's was named another top executive.
"VK is no ordinary Russian IT company; it is state-controlled and pursues ideological and intelligence goals," Dietrich said. "The Russian state pushes people to use VKontakte, and one can assume that its main objective for doing so is to lock people into one domestic, controllable social network."
VK's growth has increased substantially since March 2022, when authorities said they were classifying Facebook and related platforms like Instagram as extremist, effectively banning them.
Then there's Gosuslugi, an e-government service portal used by an estimated 100 million Russians on a regular basis. Gosuslugi has simplified the lives of millions, streamlining many of the mundane tasks that Russia's bureaucracies often made intolerable.
"If a person can get a passport with the help of Gosuslugi and is not afraid to do it, why not try to convince him to vote through the portal? And it is much easier to influence the voting results electronically than to do it offline," Russian journalist Andrei Pertsev wrote in an analysis in April.
Since 2022, Gosuslugi has been moving to integrate more of its services into VK. Roskomnadzor also used Gosuslugi to warn Russians about platforms like Instagram being blocked -- and to specifically encourage Russians to switch over to VK, or to a much smaller platform called Odnoklassniki.
"Since Russia is a country that has its own competitive Internet platforms, including the social networks VK and Odnoklassniki, with coverage of tens of millions of users, we hope that your transition to these platforms will happen quickly and that in the future you will discover new opportunities for communication and doing business," the agency said in a message sent out to millions of Gosuslugi users.
There's also military conscription.
Last April, lawmakers passed legislation that allows for electronic draft notices; if you receive an electronic message on your personal Gosuslugi account, you are considered to have been legally summoned for military duty. Failure to appear means the person temporarily loses important benefits, including the right to buy or sell a home, drive a car, or borrow money from a bank.
'Bad Consequences'
"As far as I know, this 'super app' project is a longtime dream by some Russian senior officials, at least those indeed looking at China as the essence of a country which manages to master its own 'information space,'" said Julien Nocetti, a researcher at the French Institute of International Relations specializing in Russia and cybersecurity.
It hasn't yet worked out, he said, for two reasons.
"First is the totally different configuration of Russia's cyberspace as opposed to China's," Nocetti said. "Second is the tradition of embezzlement in many government-funded digital projects over the past decade and a half in the country."
For VK, or for other social media companies like X, creating a super app makes economic sense because it gathers lots of different services under one umbrella, generating revenue. VK also explicitly states this goal on its website.
But integrating government services from Gosuslugi makes it potentially pernicious, Dietrich said. For example, a Russian user of VK can verify his or her identity on VK by using a Gosuslugi profile.
"Why would you combine the two?" he said. "It obviously makes it slightly more convenient. But can you imagine this happening in Europe for instance? Do you really think that any state would cooperate with Facebook and be like, 'Yeah, of course, you know, just take all our citizens' data, or grant them access within your app'?"
For authorities, using blocking tools or surveillance methods like SORM has huge limitations: It requires massive computer resources, and servers, to monitor enormous amounts of data that ricochet around the world constantly.
Also, Russia does yet have the domestic ability to build a lot of SORM devices, Dietrich said: Many still rely on imported parts -- a problem because of both sanctions and security.
Add to that the fact that a growing proportion of Russians are embracing VPNs and encryption tools like the Tor browser, which makes monitoring data more challenging. But if you have an integrated super app that people use for myriad daily tasks, big and small, that makes monitoring citizens easier.
"That's why they tried to implement different layers -- in order to manage circumventing [SORM]," Dietrich said, "because you're using our social media, because it's the most convenient way, because all your friends are using it, you will be pushed into using it as well."
Given the hundreds of private Internet service providers that emerged in Russia in the 1990s, and the initial popularity among Russians of Western platforms like Facebook and Instagram, it has been hard for the authorities to impose control over the RuNet, as Russia's Internet is often called.
"So they have to think about building their own localized apps and services, by which they have more power and backdoors, getting access to private data of their users in those kind of platforms," said Roya Ensafi, a computer engineering professor at the University of Michigan and co-author of several technical papers on Russia's Internet.
"If you can actually build the app that already includes the surveillance and censorship in the app itself, you have the upper hand in controlling the user," she said. "Slowly, slowly you build this surveillance ecosystem which is very easy to control by the government, because users have to use it."
"I can only see bad consequences," she said. "I can only see this as a horrible idea."
