On Tuesday, February 21, the State Duma, the lower house of Russia’s parliament, gave preliminary approval to the Digital Economy National Program draft bill, which is ostensibly aimed at ensuring the continued operation of the Russian internet (RUnet) if the country is cut off from the global internet.
An explanatory note to the bill said it was drafted in response to the “aggressive nature” of last September’s , which, the note claimed, “declared the principle of maintaining peace by force” and, “without evidence,” accused Russia, Iran and North Korea of carrying out “irresponsible cyber-attacks.”
was submitted to the State Duma in December by Federation Council Senators Andrei Klishas and Lyudmila Bokova, and State Duma deputy Andrei Lugovoi, who British authorities believe helped murder former Russian secret service officer Alexander Litvinenko in London in November 2006, poisoning him with a “polonium tea.”
Lugovoi an internet extremism bill allowing authorities to block websites containing illegal information, including calls for unsanctioned protests and “extremist” activity, the Moscow Times reported.
Klishas and Bokova, for their part, previously that would prohibit insults against state officials and ban the publication of fake news.
State Duma Chairman Vyacheslav Volodin called for finalizing the bill, saying its goal was “not to close, not to cut off, but to ensure the security of the Internet in the Russian Federation.”
Lugovoi the law is "not about turning off the internet, but about allowing our citizens to continue to use the internet in case of aggressive actions."
Reports surfaced on Monday, February 11, that Russia intends to temporarily disconnect RUnet from the global internet in the coming months to test out Russia's autonomous internet.
But is Volodin correct in saying the bill is not intended to cut off Russia from the World Wide Web?
Here’s what we know so far based on the vaguely worded bill:
The creation of this so-called sovereign internet will, in short, allow Russia to sequester RUnet from the internet, giving them far more power to monitor and control web traffic within Russia.
by the Moscow Times, Fang Binxing, the creator of “The Great Firewall of China,” put forward the concept of establishing a sovereign internet in 2011.
Beijing and Moscow have both viewed internet sovereignty as an extension of national sovereignty.
But the sovereign internet bill in Russia has been opposed on numerous grounds.
Russia’s Audit Chamber, a parliamentary financial watchdog agency, the project, whose initial cost has been estimated at 25 billion rubles (approx. $38 million), will require additional funding.
Some experts have put ancillary costs at 125 billion rubles (approx. $190 million) annually, the news portal .
The Audit Chamber likewise believes the sovereign internet project will raise the costs of goods and services in Russia.
The president of the Russian Union of Industrialists and Entrepreneurs that the sovereign RUnet could result in the “catastrophic failure” of the country’s communications networks.
It further said disconnecting Russia from foreign root servers was an unnecessary step, as Russia already has 11 root servers to rely on.
Likewise, Sergei Ivanov, a Duma deputy from the Liberal Democratic Party of Russia (LDPR), to which Lugovoi also belongs, was technically not in a position to sustain such a system on its own.
"Russia does not produce any IT hardware, only cables, which some people better hang themselves on."
Audit Chamber head Aleksei Kudrin, a former Russian finance minister, tweeted that the bill had been adopted in its first reading "too hurriedly and without open dialogue with IT and the industrial community."
Russia’s RBC news agency that the draft law in its current form is impractical, as it would require operators to continuously transmit the totality of their network scheme and traffic routing to Roskomnadzor, which they say is impossible as "the network is constantly expanding and updating."
But some have put the need for the system in starker terms.
"This is very serious. This is a path towards isolating Russia as a whole...from the Internet," Russian security analyst Andrei Soldatov as telling AFP.
Filipp Kulin, a Russian internet expert, as telling the BBC’s Russian language service: “The disconnection of Russia from the global web would mean that we are already at war with everyone. In this situation we should be thinking how to grow potatoes in a nuclear winter, and not about the internet.”
Russia is also no stranger to politically motivated censorship.