The Global internet has no one person or entity controlling it. Countries do try to take as much control over internet content that is allowed to be viewed inside their borders but at the end of the day, they need help from the outside to actually stay connected to the internet. However, Russia wants to do something completely different that is cutting itself from the global internet all together.
Russia just had it’s “sovereign internet” come into effect and will now be working on centralizing the internet services in the country through a single Telecommunications organization called Roskomnadzor. What Russia wants to do is to be able to get all its internet service providers and get them to disconnect from the global internet and reroute all internet traffic through their telecom entity Roskomnadzor. How this will work is that all Russians will be using an internet developed and maintained directly in their country with their own websites and no connection to the outside internet or services at all. For example, instead of Facebook people will be using VK, a Russian social media network similar to Facebook and instead of Google, Russians would have Yandex, which is also a Russian search engine.
However, this may sound easy on paper but in reality this is a very hard task to carry out and will even have certain consequences too. Andrew Sullivan from the Internet Society said:
What we have seen so far is that it tends to be much harder to turn off the internet, once you built a resilient internet infrastructure, than you’d think,
The project is also said to be very expensive. The project’s initial cost has been set at $38 million by Russia’s financial watchdog and sources say that it will require a further $304 million to carry out.
There have been huge demonstrations and protests in Moscow and throughout the country against this new law and more then 15 thousand people came out on to the streets in Moscow in protests but to no avail. The government seems to be adamant about carry this out.
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