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New draft law on autonomy of Russian internet has been introduced

Russian legislators have introduced new draft law aiming to guarantee an absolute autonomy to Russian segment of internet. Under proposed draft law the Russian internet watchdog would receive broad authority. The main purpose and objective of law is protection of Russian internet from external threat. The draft law provides regulation for traffic routing and control over compliance with this regulation.

The explanation note state that the law provides opportunity to minimize transferring data, which Russian internet users send to each other, through overseas territories. The draft law should secure the autonomy for Russian internet from foreign servers. The bandwidth quality would not decrease, rather it should be better legislators believe. “The opportunity to reroute the traffic would increase its quality in the place of mass gathering of users,” – believes one of the draft law authors.

The legislators are not intended to create “new Russian internet”, they just endeavor to “create stable inland internet and own system of domain names” in order to “let the citizens use the internet freely and independently”. The Russian authorities would understand “where the traffic comes from and where it goes”. Russian authorities do not intend to shut down internet in Russia. “You should be idiot to say that,” – stated Lugovoy, another author of draft law.

But the stakeholders and professionals believe the law is necessary in order to control the internet in Russia. The law defines cross-border communication lines and traffic exchange points. Their owners – communication operators – would be obliged to organize centralized control in case of emergency. The law also provides traffic filtering by the source, in other words the restriction of access to illegal information would be made not by network addressed, but by the blocking of traffic transmission.