VimpelCom Ltd. (VIP) fell to a record low in New York trading, leading a decline in Russian Internet and mobile-phone stocks amid concern President Vladimir Putin’s government may seek greater control over online traffic, Bloomberg reports.

The stocks retreated as the Safe Internet League, a Moscow-based organization that’s backed by Russia’s communications ministry, said it’s seeking to make it mandatory for Internet operators to filter web content. Putin, who has called the Internet a creation of U.S. spy agencies, said last week that Russia’s segment of the web must be protected from foreign threats.

American depositary receipts of VimpelCom, the nation’s third-biggest provider of mobile-phone services, declined 3.5 percent to $6.39, the lowest since its April 2010 listing. Yandex, Russia’s biggest Internet company, decreased 3.1 percent to $26.17 and Mail.ru Group dropped 2.8 percent to $26.69 in London. The Bloomberg Russia-US Equity Index retreated 1.4 percent to 76.94 yesterday.

“The market fears even more regulation over the industry,” Sergey Libin, an analyst at ZAO Raiffeisenbank in Moscow, said by phone. “It’s not so much the amendments themselves, but the whole talk about more regulation, more control, this is what’s so damaging.”

More government control over phone and Internet traffic may translate into higher costs for providers and lower revenue, said Anna Lepetukhina, an analyst at Sberbank CIB, OAO Sberbank’s investment unit. Putin, a former KGB colonel who’s centralized power since he became president in 2000, has been tightening control over the Internet after his annexation of Ukraine’s Crimea peninsula in March triggered the worst standoff with the U.S. and its allies since the Cold War.

“The idea is to install an automated filtration of content and that would require additional equipment and translate into additional costs,” Lepetukhina said by phone yesterday.

The proposal haven’t yet made it to parliament, Lepetukhina said, and slowing economic growth remains a greater risk than regulatory changes.

Russia’s $2 trillion economy will expand 0.3 percent this year, the worst performance since it shrank in 2009, according to the median forecast of 38 analysts surveyed by Bloomberg.