The State Duma of the Russian Federation adopted in the first reading the draft law "On ensuring the stable operation of the Russian segment of the Internet in case of disconnection from the global infrastructure of the World Wide Web." This gave rise to some media outlets to dub the venture "the great Russian firewall", and rename Runet to "Cheburnet", hinting at its restrictive nature.
In reality, national regulation of the Internet, as well as the creation and development of its own communication systems, is a necessary step that will allow Russia to get rid of the curse of the "US digital colony". It is this status that is assigned to our country by the existing structure of the World Wide Web.
The essence of the bill
One of the main provisions of the adopted bill is the creation of a national system for obtaining information on domain names and network addresses. An ordinary Internet user, when working with the Internet, usually does not even suspect how this or that domain name is formed and how it actually looks.
For example, the address of a site actually looks like https:// site_name.ru inside the Network. - with a dot at the end. This subtle dot at the end is the so-called top-level zero-level DNS query. It is sent to a specialized domain name server that contains all country zones, including the ru segment.
Subsequently, the DNS request gets to one of the Russian servers: it processes the domains of the “ru zone” corresponding to Russia, where the location of the riafan domain is determined. Finally, the server that stores the internal information of our site processes the complex name of a particular news page and uses the web data transfer protocol - in the considered HTTPS address.
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It is easy to understand that without the highest-level DNS server that is responsible for the ill-fated invisible "point", the request to the global network will not work - your computer simply will not know where to look for the "ru zone" itself. Of course, no one will prevent you from typing the direct IP address of the site you are requesting in the address bar - but the entire system of convenient web search, tied to alphabetic domain names, will stop working.
At the same time, the technical ability to "take the zero point from Russia" is recognized even by ICANN - this is an international corporation that is responsible for the formation of a domain name in accordance with an IP address on a global scale. The fact is that ICANN is registered as a corporation in the United States, and therefore its entry-level servers, although they may be located outside the United States, nevertheless obey all the requirements of American legislators.
Until now, however, such global "zero-level outages" have not happened - the organization has not taken domain zones from any states, and the US authorities have not applied prohibitive measures against domain broadcasting.
However, you should not delude yourself about this: as recently as December 2018, Monotype Imaging, the copyright holder of the popular fonts (typefaces) Times New Roman, Arial and Courier New, which are included in the "free" set of popular operating systems, such as Windows, banned them use in Russian government agencies. As the reason, the company indicated the sanctions imposed by the United States against Russia, although, of course, no specific restrictions on fonts in the sanctions were formally spelled out.
How can Russia protect its segment of the Web?
The adopted bill provides for the creation of a national system for obtaining information on domain names or network addresses. It means "a set of interconnected software and hardware designed to store and receive information about network addresses in relation to domain names, including those included in the Russian national domain zone, as well as authorization when resolving domain names." In such a florid way, the law formulates the creation and support of its "zero point" for Russia, which will be able to provide the initial binding of DNS names if any unwanted changes occur to ICANN's servers.
At the same time, of course, the State Duma is not going to "disconnect" Russia from the Internet - China followed exactly the same path in its time. He duplicated on his national territory all the critical systems of the World Wide Web, but, nevertheless, retained all the necessary contacts with the outside world.
Nothing prevents, if desired, from organizing in Russia an analogue of the “great Chinese firewall” - however, as the practice of existing Roskomnadzor locks shows, the Russian regulator successfully fights against prohibited content on the world wide web without such radical measures.
It is important to emphasize that the adopted bill does not introduce any additional restrictions beyond the existing ones - it is, rather, about the creation of new, purely Russian systems that will allow the national segment to avoid collapse in the event of its forced disconnection from the World Wide Web.
Of the prohibitive measures in the law, one can only mention the requirement for telecom operators to install technical means to counter cyber threats. According to the text of the document, these tools should be able to restrict access to resources with prohibited information not only by network addresses, as Roskomnadzor does today, but also by prohibiting traffic transmission.
However, as the practice of the same China shows, these technical means work well only in the case of explicit binding of traffic to known IP addresses and domain names, while any traffic anonymization systems (VPN channels, anonymizers or proxy servers) are not bad. bypass. Thus, even in this formally prohibitive measure, the new bill will change little in the existing practice of blocking, but will only introduce an additional measure of protection against certain types of cyber threats.
The experience of financiers
The current stage of "Internet sovereignty" that we are witnessing today is very similar to the process of creating the National Payment Card System, which Russia successfully carried out in 2014-2015.
Five years ago, after the United States imposed sanctions against Russia in connection with the annexation of Crimea, the international payment systems Visa and MasterCard almost immediately stopped servicing payment cards of several Russian banks in retail outlets and ATMs of the international network.
In addition, two regions of Russia - Crimea and Sevastopol - were forcibly excluded from the payment circulation. More than two million inhabitants of the Crimean peninsula and numerous tourists by such actions of Visa and MasterCard were artificially thrown back twenty years ago: in Crimea it turned out to be possible to pay only in cash.
Already on July 23, 2014, to solve this problem, the National System of Payment Cards Joint Stock Company (JSC NSPK) was created, which was assigned two tasks - the creation of an operational and clearing center for processing domestic transactions on cards of international payment systems, as well as the issuance and promotion of a national payment card.
At the time of the creation of the NSPK, the monopoly of Visa and MasterCard seemed unshakable, because they also had the "zero point" of the financial system in their hands, which determined the numbers of payment cards and their international recognition. However, realizing that Russia in a record time - about six months - was able to create its own operational center for processing all transactions in the country, international systems preferred to put on a good face with their frankly lost game - and began to conclude agreements with NSPK so as not to lose the capacious Russian market …
Visa was the first to surrender, which already in June 2015 “came in peace” to NSPK. The next month it was joined by the European MasterCard and the Japanese JCB, and the last agreement at the end of July 2015 was signed by the American payment system AmericanExpress.
Along the way, it turned out that international payment systems also shamelessly profited from Russian users. Despite the reduction in tariffs within the NSPK, having started 2015 with 2.61 billion rubles in revenue and 1.21 billion in net profit, by 2017 the national payment system reached 7.9 billion rubles in revenue and a profit of 3.3 billion rubles. It is easy to understand that until 2014 all this money was successfully deposited in the pockets of international payment systems.
In a word, all the horror stories about "Cheburnet" are nothing more than an attempt to keep Russia in the status of a "digital colony". After all, someone with the adoption of a new law on the "zero point" can lose both a lot of money and a convenient lever of influence on our country.
Author: Alexey Anpilogov
