
Earlier this year, Russia announced plans to briefly disconnect its internet from the rest of the world by or on April 1.
The internet disconnection experiment was agreed on in January during a session of the Information Security Working Group, which includes a co-founder of Kaspersky Lab and representatives of major telecommunications companies such as Beeline and MTS. The working group is advising the Russian Duma on implementing a sovereign internet bill currently under consideration. The bill aims to create a centralized traffic control system in Russia, build a national domain database, and require Russian network operators to install government-approved tools for counteracting potential cyber threats. As Robert Morgus and Justin Sherman described recently in Future Tense, with this bill, Russia is taking steps to alter the very architecture of its internet, “which, once enacted, would be difficult to reverse.”
Full article on SLATE