Putin is trying hard to put the Internet under control, but still it remains a relatively free medium, because the Russian Internet developed itself in the nineties, which was the time of political freedom and economic competition. It thus developed itself in a very competitive way, whereby every Internet service provider tried to build its own transborder link.
For instance, China has three transborder links for its domestic Internet providers, while Russia has more than 900 of them. The Chinese Internet was built by design as a very controllable one, while the Russian Internet was built as relatively free. Now, so far, Putin's efforts to put it under censorship are failing. They're not so successful.
Going back to your previous and very important question, once again, Putin was selling stability and the concept of poverty in the nineties, and that he was bringing stability, and so on. Now, however, Russia is going through a generational change. Putin has been there for 22 years now, so a whole generation has appeared of people who have not known anything but Putin, and they want change and they look for change.
These people are also native Internet users, not a native TV audience. The audience for Putin's TV propaganda decreases, while the audience of people who have Internet access increases. Also, people have travelled a lot. This is very contrary to what people experienced in communist times. People have been very able to travel to Europe to see how democracy is working and how society could live under a democracy, and so on.
It's a slow change. You are right. Putin still enjoys quite a lot of support. The polling of Levada is quite correct; he's at about 50%, but it's not any longer the 80% approval rating that he had 10 years ago. As many people manage to get access to different opinions on the Internet, people try to realize what's going on, and things such as, for instance, our investigative video are of great help here.