Russia to Develop a “Sovereign” Internet Space By Detaching Runet From Rest Of The Web

Amidst the talks of threats of a boycott of the Internet on Russia, Russia has plans to circumvent this problem. They have passed a bill that guarantees

On April 16, the State Duma adopted the law on ensuring the stable operation of the Russian Internet segment (Runet) in case the country is disconnected from the global Internet infrastructure in its third reading.

The bill was devised and presented by Chairman of the Federation Council Committee on Constitutional Legislation and State Building Andrey Klishas, his First Deputy Lyudmila Bokova and MP Andrei Lugovoy.

The new legislation envisions a full range of proposals to secure the operation of the Russian internet and to counter cyber-threats. They include the creation of a national DNS system that stores all domain names and corresponding IP addresses and would provide cryptographic data protection.

It even restricts the transfer of data shared between Russian internet users to servers outside of the country.

Introduced by a group of lawmakers in December 2018, the bill was intended as a response to the “aggressive” US National Cyber Strategy, which accuses Russia, along with China, Iran, and North Korea, of using cyber tools to “weaken” its economy and democracy. It also threatens dire consequences for anyone conducting cyber activity against the US.

“The [stable Runet] law is completely modern and reasonable. Many countries have already taken similar measures to protect national domains. Russia is perfectly in line here with the information security trends. The law focuses on stable Runet because it creates a duplicate backup infrastructure needed for the Internet to operate. The Russian encryption will be used parallel to the already functioning systems and in case any of foreign certificates turns off, the Russian analog will continue operating,” Petrov said.

Crypto industry in Russia will take a major hit as well. Artem Kozlyuk, one of the leading voices against this regulation says:

“Currently, cryptocurrencies in our country are in the gray zone and crypto portals are often being prosecuted. But we have cases when our lawyers successfully challenged their illegal blocking. Of course, in such conditions, it’s difficult to provide these services and Russian developers have been looking towards other markets, where there are fewer risks of this kind and authorities demonstrate a more positive interest in this space.”