I don't think it's about competitiveness as government intervention is always bad for competition. It's about national security, and it's a tradeoff between economic interest vs. security. Look at the great firewall of China as it has many similarities.
Anyway, if you are a citizen of Russia, would you rather be monitored by Putin or Biden? It's a loss-loss situation, lol.
lucky I don't live in the both
(them) area....living in a country where always keeping an eye on its citizens sounds terrible to me "lol".
How will increase the competitiveness?
It doesn't and it makes actually things worse, Russian apps will no longer have to compete with others for Russian users, so with limited choice and trapped consumers, their need to innovate will follow the same trends as their entire industry during the Soviet era,
sounds creepy....we will probably see a strange device, hardware, software created by the Russian government specifically for its citizens and not avail in other countries "lol".
snip
Unfortunately for them with every step they make they run out of options, right now they are like some vegans boycotting burger king, with their economy taking hit after hit a dwindling population they should understand that they are no longer in a position to threaten economically the UE alone, not combined with the US. Furthermore, such measures also hit their so-called allies as the guys from Xiaomi or Oppo won't be that happy either, just yesterday I cleaned a miui from bloatware, and my god how much crap was there.
"lol" what you find there
(Xiaomi & oppo), is there some kind of worm-shaped tracking device sending signals to panda country
The government wants to track every single device that's being owned by their citizen. That's just the same in China CMIIW, that they can track every single device there but without even installing software because they're into the hardware which is being produced in their country. And why others are worried about it because they do it to track and sees it as national threat for other countries because they can do surveillance through those devices.
looks like that, they do the tracking and also increase the competition as @stompix said.