MOSCOW, September 19. /ITAR-TASS/. The full separation of Russian segment of Internet, known as Runet, from the global network is impossible both due to technical and political reasons, experts told ITAR-TASS on Friday.
The chief of Safe Internet League, Denis Davydov, hinted on Friday that such danger exists as the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), which oversees global IP address allocation, is directly subordinated to the US Department of Commerce.
Alexey Salnikov, the deputy director of the Information Security Institute at the Moscow State University, has rejected this possibility. “ICANN is unlikely to have technical possibilities to fully cut off one or several segments from the global Internet network,” he said on Friday. “The structure of the Internet envisages that if any provider shuts off its networking equipment, the traffic will go through another provider,” Salnikov explained.
The coordinator at Safer Internet Center in Russia, Urvan Parfentyev, said there have been no such precedents when countries were cut off the Internet and this could result in further political risks for the United States. “A huge amount of program and technical infrastructure of the Internet is within the US jurisdiction and may be used in the US interests. If any national domain is cut off, this will prove that supporters of the idea that the Internet issues should be managed by the United Nations are right,” he said.
The Vedomosti newspaper reported that Russia’s Security Council, chaired by President Vladimir Putin, is due to discuss on Monday ways in which Russia could separate itself from the Internet in case of an emergency.