The world’s internet infrastructure does not have a central authority. For it to work, everyone must trust everyone. As a result, the global patchwork of undersea cables, satellites and other technologies that connect the world often ignore the national borders we routinely encounter and, to stay connected, many countries must rely on infrastructures that lie outside their own limits and control.
Now, Russia is making plans to be technologically independent: it wants to disconnect its internet from the rest of the world, in a giant “unplugging” experiment that will affect more than 100 million Russian internet users.
It would not be a permanent thing, but rather a temporary test, designed to see if it is possible that a Russian Internet isolated from the global network can function, in the case of a cyber attack or a cyber war , to be able to isolate itself from foreign servers and be protected.
“There is a high probability of ‘tectonic shifts’ in our relations with the West. Therefore, our task is to adjust the Russian segment of the internet to protect it from such scenarios,” explained German Klimenko, former internet adviser to Russian President Vladimir Putin. .
A law for Runet
This idea is on the way to becoming law, as a bill was introduced in December 2018 that received provisional approval from Russian lawmakers last week.
According to the bill, Russian internet providers must implement technical measures on their networks to counter potential threats from foreign attackers; effectively, the idea is to isolate the Russian network (sometimes called Runet) from the rest of the web, and ensure that all traffic is transmitted to internal systems in the country.
At the same time, Roskomnadzor, the Russian agency responsible for communications, will gain new powers to control and censor prohibited media on the Internet, which currently Russian ISPs carry out independently.
Supporters of the initiative say these initiatives come in response to the onslaught of the US government’s new cybersecurity strategy that was unveiled in September.
“Requests to increase pressure on our country in the West force us to think of additional ways to protect Russian sovereignty in cyberspace ,” Leonid Levin, chairman of a Russian committee on information technology, said in January. “Russia’s disconnection from the global network is a possible scenario amid escalating international tensions.”
Not everyone agrees
Defenders of human rights and internet freedoms say the disconnect threatens to create another technological dystopia similar to the Great Firewall of China .
Even the Russian Union of Industrialists and Entrepreneurs considers that extreme measures constitute a stronger threat to the functioning of the Internet in Russia than any hypothetical foreign cyber attack ( Russia against all? )
Despite these reservations, it is expected that the plan will soon be enshrined in law, and although no one knows when the ‘great Russian unplug’ will occur, it should happen imminently, before April 1, according to the draft.
In any case, unforeseen problems will almost certainly arise in the goal of separating from the rest of the world. Most websites depend on multiple servers to function: a news website can depend on an Amazon Web Services cloud server, Google tracking software, and a Facebook comment plug-in, all outside of Russia. We’ll see what happens.
Reference: RBC.ru Newspaper
