Russia wants to cut itself off from the Internet, according to media reports

A Russian bill apparently requires websites in the country to transfer to servers located in Russia starting March 11. In addition, domestic domains such as .ru are to be used where possible. Apparently, the country plans to completely cut itself off from the global Internet.

Digital Russia moves

The Ministry of Digital Development Communications and Mass Media in Russia has apparently drafted a bill that would require Russian websites to move their content to a domestic server and a Russian domain – preferably .ru – starting March 11.

However, there are only four days left, as all content must be moved to Russian resources or services by March 15. The same should apply to the registration of DNS servers, which must also be located in Russia.

According to media reports, the information about the current location of data and resources should be submitted to the ministry as early as March 9. If data is retrieved from abroad, this must be plausibly justified to the government. This also includes the amount of data on the Internet, as well as the necessary bandwidth.

Apparently, the authorities are planning in this way to determine the maximum need for their own Internet, active only from Russia, which can cope without the aid of all resources from abroad.

Is this feasible?

This was first reported by the independent, Eastern European news magazine NEXTA, which is based in Warsaw, Poland. ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers), ISOC (Internet Society) and the IPE NCC (RIPE Network Coordination Centre), on the other hand, have objected to a possible cut-off of Russia from the Internet.

Thus, the Russian government seems to want to plan exactly what content will be made available on its own country’s Internet and who will be able to access it. In this way, the country seems to want to counteract the increasing global isolation – also in the technology sector – after many cloud and stream providers, as well as technology groups, have recently turned away from the country.

AWS, Microsoft or Google do not offer any services in Russia anyway. There, the market leader in the search engine sector is Yandex, which has a market share of 64 percent and offers email services, a browser and various cloud options in addition to search.