Everyone, of course, is aware of the latest discussions in the State Duma regarding the autonomous Runet. Many have heard about it, but what it is and what it has to do with it - they did not think. In this article, I tried to explain why this is necessary and how it will affect Russian users of the global network.
In general terms, the strategy of action in the draft law is described as follows:
“...a bill on state control over the passage of Internet traffic on the territory of Russia. In particular, it provides for the creation of a register of Runet IP addresses and “monitoring of the use of global addressing resources and global Internet identifiers (DNS and IP addresses)”, as well as the establishment of state control over international communication channels and traffic exchange points ... "
I would like to draw your special attention to "state control over the international communication channel and traffic exchange points" - this is the same "drawbridge" between the servers / channels of information exchange within the country and similar means / Internet users around the world. Or, to put it simply, a breaker. Read on for what this actually means.
Of course, most politicians are FOR, you need to protect yourself from enemies, they are around and at any moment can cut off access to cats and dogs in classmates. But this is a far-fetched argument, since the World Wide Web is so ramified that the Americans, even if they wanted to, could not disrupt the work of the entire Runet, since it is GLOBAL.
The only arguments (in my opinion) in "turning off" the Runet can be 2 hypotheses
1. Through ICANN is an international non-profit organization registered in the United States, and it distributes domain names. Russian politicians say that the organization is controlled by the American authorities and can, on their orders, take away the top-level domains ru and rf. But this has never happened before in history, even with more malicious and smaller players (countries) that are objectionable to Washington. Moreover, in 2015, the US Department of Commerce, with which ICANN was supposed to consult on strategic decisions, lost these functions.
2. Through a regional Internet IP address registrar RIPE NCC is an independent Dutch association that has repeatedly stressed that it is not involved in politics, but simply keeps a record of addresses. Moreover, if they decide to take blocks of IP addresses from Russia, this will disrupt the Internet in other countries as well.
To sort it out why, how and why, in my opinion, you need to start with a small history of the formation of the Runet.
A Brief History of Runet
The history of the Russian Internet can be safely started in 1990, when in January, with the funding of the American Association for Progressive Communications from San Francisco, the public organization Glasnet was created. This public organization was designed to provide links to teachers, human rights activists, environmentalists and other guarantors of an open society.
1991 - 1995, the first connections to the World Wide Web appear, usually within the framework of research institutes, in parallel, the first providers appear and connect a few users. Registration of the RU domain at the Kurchatov Institute, which creates a backbone infrastructure for combining university networks RUNNet (Russian Universities Network). The appearance of the first server.
1996 — The Open Society Institute (Soros Foundation) launched the University Internet Centers program for five years, until 2001. The program is implemented jointly with the Government of the Russian Federation. The acquisition of equipment and financial support for the University Internet Centers in the amount of $100 million is carried out by the Soros Foundation. This served as a further technical impetus for the development of the Internet in Russia.
Number of users 384 thousand
1997 - the emergence of the Yandex.ru search engine for searching in the Russian-speaking segment.
June 28 can be considered the first known action in history to justify the Internet - as free space. Then the website of the Moscow Libertarium opened a section dedicated to SORM-2(system of operational-search measures), which makes it possible for FSB officers to effectively circumvent the requirements of the Constitution and current legislation in terms of the binding nature of a court decision to limit the secrecy of correspondence, to computer networks.
The publication of news, studies, comments, as well as various actions against SORM-2, led to the fact that information about the SORM-2 project, which allows surveillance of citizens, has become public knowledge
The number of users reached 1,2 million.
1998 - 2000 The number of users reaches 2 million. The first major online news publications appear, more than 300 Internet providers operate in the country, the network architecture grows at a tremendous pace, the first advertising networks appear, the first intellectual property infringements, etc.
In general, the 90s can be considered the basis for the formation and development of the Internet in Russia, which was created in conditions of freedom and lack of control by the state and, in general, at the expense of commercial and charitable organizations. This is reflected in its internal decentralized topology of networks and servers that are not tied to specific territories and do not fall under the jurisdiction of a particular country. Subsequently, all this allowed the Russian segment to grow to a very impressive size.
History of State Control Attempts
The threat of state control over the Runet arose already in 1999, then the Minister of Communications Leonid Reiman and press minister Mikhail Lesin proposed to take away the authority to manage the RU domain zone from a public organization created at the Kurchatov Institute (RosNIIROS), which invested efforts and funds to create the first networks. After a ministerial meeting led by the Prime Minister (Putin) and Internet figures (with the latter actively fighting), control over the RU domain zone was nevertheless taken away from an uncontrolled public organization.
From the book Red Web - about the history of the control of domestic special services over telecom:
Head of the Effective Policy Fund (FEP) Gleb Pavlovsky initiated a meeting of Internet figures with Vladimir Putin, who was then Prime Minister. Pavlovsky is a political strategist, who at that moment was close to the Presidential Administration. His FEP then created a number of popular Internet projects - Gazeta.ru, Vesti.ru, Lenta.ru, etc.
At the meeting, Putin told internet figures about Reiman and Lesin's proposals. Soldatov (head of Relcom, author's note), who by that time Rykov (government adviser on information technology, author's note) has already informed about these proposals, became vehemently object. opposed and Anton Nosik (“The father of Runet,” as the media called him, was a journalist who stood at the origins of the formation of Runet, at that time he was a member of the FEP council and oversaw projects such as Vesti.ru, Lenta.ru, author’s note). Of the representatives of the Internet industry, only a designer Artemy Lebedev advocated reforming RosNIIROS, accusing the organization of maintaining high prices for domains.
“If a law is adopted in Russia regulating activities on the Internet, this will mean a redistribution of property in the Internet market in the interests of those people who order this law.” ―Anton Borisovich Nosik
In 2000, Putin signed the doctrine of information security, which contained such threats as "the intention of a number of countries to dominate and violate Russia's interests in the information environment." Within the framework of this doctrine, work began on the preparation and development of a set of measures: the search and creation of personnel, the expansion and opening of special departments within the relevant departments and ministries, etc.
Since the late 2000s, the Russian authorities have stepped up work to deprive the American corporation ICANN, which is under the formal control of the US authorities, of the authority to distribute global domain zones and IP addresses. However, representatives of the United States met this idea extremely cool.
Then the Russians changed tactics and tried to take authority from ICANN through the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), which regulates traditional telecommunications and is headed by the Maltese Hamadoun Tur, a graduate of the Leningrad Institute of Communications. In 2011, then-Prime Minister Vladimir Putin met Tour in Geneva and told him about the need to transfer authority for the distribution of Internet resources from ICANN to ITU. Russia prepared a draft ITU resolution and began to gather support from China and the countries of Central Asia.
On December 8, 2012, the head of the US delegation, Terry Kramer, called these proposals an attempt to censor the Internet. Realizing that the proposal would not pass, on December 10, the Tour persuaded the Russian side to withdraw it.
Actually, at this point, Russia's attempts to create a starting point and get a grain of influence to regulate the Internet on the world stage collapsed. And the Russian powers that be completely switched to the domestic segment.
Yandex struggle
In the autumn of 2008, the Yandex company began to feel one after another trouble: its new data center could not be launched due to bureaucratic problems, a criminal case was opened, in which the head of the company appeared Arkady Volozh, and the entrepreneur showed interest in buying the company Alisher Usmanov. Yandex feared a hostile takeover.
The reasons for the dissatisfaction of the authorities with Arkady Volozh were explained in the form of screenshots shown from the main page of the Yandex.News aggregator, made during the Russian-Georgian war. To clarify the situation, two ministers (Vladislav Surkov и Konstantin Kostin) visited the Yandex office, where they tried to explain to officials that it was not people who were involved in the selection of news in this service, a robotacting on special algorithm.
According to the memoirs of Gershenzon, the head of YandexNews, Surkov interrupted his speech and pointed to a liberal headline on Yandex.News. “These are our enemies, we don’t need this,” said the deputy head of the Presidential Administration. Konstantin Kostin demanded that officials be granted access to the service interface.
Yandex was shocked by the results of negotiations with the authorities. But in the end, the fight with officials ended with the granting of partner status with the mark "representative of an interested newsmaker" and at the same time he entered the board of directors of "Yandex" Alexander Voloshin, former head of the Administration of President Boris Yeltsin and Vladimir Putin.
Approximately the same scenario, but in varying degrees of sophistication, can be seen in cases of partial wringing out of Kaspersky Lab () and Vkontakte (). And these are only resonant cases known to the author.
Further, the machine of prohibitions and regulation of the Runet was already gaining momentum and acquired modern features. Special laws were prepared with vague content so that they would not be directly considered censorship, under the auspices of security or the fight against extremism. Blocking illegal content, through the expansion of the powers of Roskomnadzor, has already become widespread. The powers that be held “negotiations” with the major players in this segment. Well, as the culmination of this stage, real administrative cases have already begun with fines and criminal prosecutions of ordinary users, who are entrenched in the public mind as “For likes and reposts”.
Therefore, in order to finally control the network, the only thing left for those in power is to adopt the experience of China (they thought about it even earlier) and begin work on the centralization of the Runet. For many experts, this seems to be a difficult and expensive “pleasure”, since China built its network immediately with the advent of the Internet in the region, and in Russia, as described above, it was built by itself. But the main thing is to start, because there is already an agreement with the Chinese and experience, so to speak, flows like a stream from the Middle Kingdom.
There is an opinion officials that this bill is aimed only at protecting Russian business (near-state, of course) and government services from the intrigues of the Americans. Allegedly, you need to protect them from disconnection and save their data. But the fact that they are all already functioning for some reason officials do not speak on internal servers (all government websites, near-state businesses, high-tech enterprises within the military-industrial complex, etc.). Moreover, the recent payment system "MIR" was introduced in connection with the possibility of Americans to block already existing popular payment systems. Trust me, they are as secure as possible and specialized hardware with protection against cyber threats has been around for a long time.
Why is this a trap?
The bill on the sovereign Internet will allow work to begin on the creation of an internal network infrastructure, where all traffic to foreign servers first passes through state-controlled "gateways"
- Internet providers will install special equipment aimed at countering cyber threats (although they are already doing this as part of the Yarovaya Package).
- Ensuring control of all traffic of Russian users.
- Creation of a registry of traffic exchange points, DNS and IP addresses.
- Collection of data from companies organizing the work of the Network.
And while the “debates” are underway, the Ministry of Communications has already prepared a resolution providing for the restriction of the routing of Russian traffic outside the Runet in order to protect us, citizens, from “wiretapping” of unfriendly countries. The new law will untie their hands and give them the means to do so. The resolution also says: “…by 2020, the share of internal traffic of the Russian segment of the Internet, which goes through foreign servers, should decrease down to 5%…”, Doesn’t this remind you of the Iron Curtain, but so far only in the virtual space?
And do you really think that after the implementation of control over external traffic and enforcement measures to store data on servers in Runet, they will leave everything as it is?
Results
All these measures will affect all working Russians and Russian netizens who have not been subjected to patriotic frenzy.
Quite literally and without metaphors, the state will take money out of your pocket in order to limit your receipt of information.
The chain reaction from such actions, without exaggeration, is massive.
We use services and gadgets that are almost all developed by foreign companies, not all of these companies will want to duplicate information on Russian servers, while paying for their storage, thereby affecting the exit from the market of these services (for which the loss of Russian users is insignificant), Of course, not everyone will leave, thereby reducing competition, which will eventually affect pricing policy. Not to mention that they will constantly crash due to losing connection with their servers abroad.
It is not known whether they will be ready.
Facebook/Instagram/Reddit/Twitter/YouTube/Vimeo/Vine/WhatsApp/Viber and other popular services of such Internet giants as Amazon/Google/Microsoft and others. transfer information to servers in the Russian zone, this amount of data and work on transferring them , in my opinion, is incomparable with the income from our market now, and even more so in the future.
Many toys will stop working or fall off every 10 minutes of online play, free torrent trackers will not be available even through proxy servers. You will no longer watch your favorite films "without registration and SMS", with horror to find that the search engines no longer find Marvel and DC, because access to these resources abroad will be blocked.
And another, in my opinion, terribly important factor that ordinary users may not consider is the communication problems that will be faced scientists and researchers. Since this is the most dependent, on the openness of obtaining information, the community. After all, it will not be a secret to anyone that the largest scientists and research databases are located abroad.
Having isolated the Internet from the rest of the world and redistributed the network architecture within the Runet, the authorities will be able to proceed to the next phase (or in parallel) - this is the creation (according to the invaluable experience of the Celestial Empire) of software and hardware for automatic control and blocking of illegal content. And this is already an analogue of the great Chinese firewall (below is the link for review)
And it's all for our money
Of course, the above requires time and a huge amount of money, technology and knowledge. There will be sufficient problems with the latter, and it remains to be hoped for. Plus, this is a rather sad forecast. As for money, it doesn’t matter, there are many options - they will introduce an additional tax on Internet providers and don’t be surprised when you find an increase in your tariff by 100-200 rubles.
The conclusions in the article are solely the author's own opinion. If you doubt with the given evidence, then you still have Google - google the events described in the article, read and dive further into this rabbit hole.
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Source: habr.com