Why Moscow temporarily disconnects its internet services?

Russia has decided to cut itself off from the rest of the internet world - temporarily. According to a report on the Russian news site RBC, the planned disconnection is intended to analyse the country’s preparedness to see how Russia’s internet infrastructure would operate should the country be cut off from the rest of the world digitally to protect Russia from external threats and to strengthen the cyber defence capabilities. However, the critics worry that it would facilitate censorship.

Under the draft law, all internal internet traffic would be carried within the country’s own networks. Any traffic that leaves Russia would be forced to go thorough registered exchange points, subject to regulation by the state communications regulator Roskomnadzor. The fact is creation of independent internet is like securing their own country and citizens from cyber warfare, just like we protect our national border.

This is the impact of the Great Firewall of China that restricts the access of the country’s internet users to content deemed harmful by the authorities and this has attracted the idea of creation of a Russian intranet.

The policy under the Digital Economy National Program ensures that Russian internet service providers can continue to operate should the country be sanctioned by foreign powers. As it currently stands, the root servers for the domain name system - the system that lets you type in google.com instead of an IP address - are all located outside of Russia, though copies of the DNS exist locally should access be cut off.

The draft law also stipulates that domestic traffic should be routed through Russia’s telecoms regulator, Roskomnadzor. Officials want to route 95 percent of all internet traffic locally by 2020, drawing analogies to China’s Great Firewall, an aggressive internet-traffic monitoring program.

The Great Firewall of China (GFW) is the combination of legislative actions and technologies enforced by the People's Republic of China to regulate the internet domestically. Its role in the Internet censorship in China is to block access to selected foreign websites and to slow down cross-border internet traffic. The effect includes - limiting access to foreign information sources, blocking foreign internet tools (e.g. Google search, Facebook, Twitter etc.) and mobile apps, and requiring foreign companies to adapt to domestic regulations. Besides censorship, the GFW has also influenced the development of China's internal internet economy by nurturing domestic companies and reducing the effectiveness of products from foreign internet companies.

The 29-nation NATO alliance recognized cyber as a domain of warfare, along with land, air and sea in 2014, but has not outlined in detail what that entails.

Experts, say Russia is planning the next step in making the country independent from the West, at least in cyberspace: Moscow wants to install its own root servers.

The most Russian internet companies are supportive of the regulations, but worry that the preliminary test will cause major disruptions. The test, supposedly slated for some time around April 1, comes as Russia faces a growing international outcry over its efforts to disrupt other political events through coordinate information operations. Social-media companies like Facebook and Google have been investing heavily in trying to weed out deceptive accounts run by so-called “troll farms”, as reported by ZDNet.

Washington already has cyber weapons, such as computer code to take down websites or shut down IT systems, and in 2011 declared that it would respond to hostile cyber acts. The United States, Britain, Germany, Norway, Spain, Denmark and the Netherlands are drawing up cyber warfare principles to guide their militaries on what justifies deploying cyber-attack weapons more broadly, aiming for agreement by early 2019.

The future of the internet will be shaped by a handful of American tech leaders including Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon and Chinese tech titans such as Tencent, Alibaba and Baidu. Today, around 90% of internet searches are via Google, and just 1% of smartphones use an operating system that isn’t iOS or Android – made by Apple and Google. Facebook, YouTube, Google and Twitter pose a problem to society because of data misuse and extreme content. Every country is coming up with their strong data privacy and enforcement law to protect their netizens and assets of the country and there has been no compromise on it.

If every country will bring their own internet services to protect their geography, most likely cybercrime will be fully controlled. Also, the think tank feels that the monopoly of the tech led countries could not influence further and cost for acquiring likes, visibility in social media and cost for making news/video viral to come down drastically.