The Federation Council approved a bill on the safe and sustainable operation of the Internet in Russia, which bears the unofficial name “On the Sovereign Runet.” 151 senators voted for the document, four were against it, and one abstained. The new law will come into force after it is signed by the president in November. The only exceptions are provisions on cryptographic information protection and the obligation of operators to use the national domain name addressing system - they will start working on January 1, 2021.
The authors of the bill were members of the Federation Council Andrei Klishas and Lyudmila Bokova, as well as State Duma deputy Andrei Lugovoi. The document is intended to ensure the stability of the Russian segment of the World Wide Web in the event of a threat to its stable operation from abroad. According to Klishas, disconnecting Russia from American servers is not such an unrealistic scenario, since the United States has a number of laws allowing such measures. If this happens, banking services, online ticket ordering systems and some other sites will stop working in our country.
To avoid the described consequences, the bill provides for the creation of a monitoring and control center under Roskomnadzor, which will coordinate the actions of operators in extraordinary circumstances. The latter will be ordered to install special equipment with which Roskomnadzor will be able to manage Internet traffic routes in the event of threats. An additional function of this equipment will be blocking access to sites prohibited in the Russian Federation, which is now carried out by the providers themselves. The government will determine the procedure for managing the network and establishing requirements for equipment.
It is also planned to create a national domain name system and a complete transition of government agencies to Russian encryption tools. It is planned to spend 30 billion budget rubles on the implementation of all these projects, of which 20,8 billion will be spent on the purchase of equipment.
Unlike members of the Federation Council, Russians are not so unanimous in their assessment of the bill on a “sovereign Runet”. According to a study by the Levada Center, 64% of respondents responded negatively to this initiative. They are also supported by some experts who have assessed the dependence of the domestic segment of the Network on foreign infrastructure. According to their calculations, only 3% of domestic Russian traffic goes outside the country. Against the backdrop of such opinions, Federation Council Speaker Valentina Matvienko called on senators to continue explanatory work in order to explain to the public that the law was not developed to isolate Russia from the World Wide Web, but, on the contrary, is designed to protect the state from being disconnected from it.
Source: 3dnews.ru