A few days ago, Russian journalists excited the news - by 2024, the volume of external traffic in Russia will be reduced from 60% to 5%. The Internet howled: hello, "The Great Chinese Firewall", goodbye, Telegram, overseas proxy servers, VPN and other joys of a free life. Of course, everything is not so simple - the media, out of old habit, fanned a sensation out of nothing. However, we have something to discuss: after 6-8 years, the Runet will really be different.
So what happened?
On July 11, the Kommersant newspaper - and then on the website - published the news: the Ministry of Telecom and Mass Communications “submitted to the government a draft national program“Digital Economy”, which contains more stringent requirements for information security. "Stricter requirements" mean the same restrictions on foreign traffic: up to five percent by 2024. The actual reference to the project was not given by Kommersant, noting that the publication has a “copy of the document” at its disposal. This publication created a chain reaction - the media began to reprint the dark news, accompanying it with panicky analogies with the Chinese Internet.
In fact, nothing terrible happened - and most likely it will not. The Digital Economy program is rather ideological and recommendatory. There is no direct goal of reducing external traffic to exactly five percent. In addition, the voiced figure of 60% of traffic, which is allegedly now being routed through foreign services, raises questions. As stated in last year's report "on the actual state of routing of domestic traffic through foreign networks", the share received from abroad is 2.37%. That is, according to this document, there is no need to cut anything - the percentage of foreign traffic is negligible.
Moreover, no sensation happened: the previous version of the Digital Economy is walking on the global web, where it was supposed to reduce the percentage of “foreign” traffic from 50 to 10 percent by 2024, which is also quite draconian measures. The document came out a year ago, and there was no hysteria. Why did it happen now? Apparently, then they simply could not unearth the "sensation".
And if the report is wrong and there is actually much more traffic - then what will happen?
This is also possible: according to our sources, there are no complete statistics on the volume of loopback traffic in Russia. Even the mentioned document lacks data from Rostelecom, the largest provider. But if we assume that now a few percent are falling from the "hillock", it is still a huge amount of data that can affect the end user.
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Why fix obstacles is a separate conversation. The Ministry of Telecom and Mass Communications (and hence the state) may have their own motives. For example, financial, the resource info24.ru claims, referring to the founder of Social Data Hub Artur Khachuyan:
“An increase in traffic means an increase in advertising contracts as well, and the transfer of traffic to Russian servers can give an impetus to the development of infrastructure in the industry. But there are two options for how to implement this. In China, they first started to develop internal servers. 85-90% of the inhabitants of the Celestial Empire did not use third-party developments, the Chinese had their own social networks, search engines and other services. And then China had a fight with Google, launched a firewall, and it turned out that users can live almost painlessly in an autonomous Internet. Because there are developments. The second option is stick-forced, when the same Roskomnadzor will look, for example, on which servers the data of the state company is stored and will bombard them with letters with a decision to move to the "correct" server."
The reasons can also be political. As Izvestia wrote a year ago, referring to the head of the Netoscope project, the closure of Russian traffic inside the country can be aimed at protecting against wiretapping by foreigners.
“Russian traffic abroad can be saved and then, if necessary, decrypted. Unencrypted information is not difficult to read, but encrypted (https) information can cause problems. However, in 10-15 years, technologies may allow access to this data,”iz.ru reports.
Still, it's too early to panic. The above does not mean that in the next decade we will suddenly find ourselves in the Slavic version of the Chinese Internet.
Author: Ilya Bozhko