MOSCOW, April 19. /TASS/. The law on ensuring the stable operation of the Russian Internet segment (Runet) follows the world trends of information security, Russian Internet Development Institute Director Sergey Petrov told TASS on Friday.
On Friday, the Russian Federation Council (Parliament’s upper house) Committee on Constitutional Legislation and State Building supported the law on ensuring the stable operation of the Russian Internet segment in case the country is disconnected from the global Internet infrastructure and recommended the upper house of the Parliament to adopt it at a meeting on April 22.
"The [stable Runet] law is completely modern and reasonable. Many countries have already taken similar measures to protect the national domains. Russia is perfectly in line here with the information security trends," Petrov said.
According to him, lately "in pursuit of clickbait articles for the broader audience the emphasis [of the law] was shifted." "The law focuses on the stable Runet because it creates a duplicate backup infrastructure needed for the Internet to operate. The Russian encryption will be used parallel to the already functioning systems and in case any of foreign certificates turns off, the Russian analogue will continue operating," he clarified.
"The same is true for the root server addresses system. Nothing will change, foreign servers will continue functioning but in case of failures or outages in Russia, a duplicate backup server will keep working. Therefore, Russia will remain a part of the global Internet space and the Russian segment’s stability and steadiness will be higher," Petrov pointed out.
Director of the Russian Competence Center for Import Substitution in the ICT Sector Ilya Massukh emphasized that the law will help "a certain degree of sovereignty over the Russian segment of the Internet emerge, it will be managed internally." "There are no economic advantages here, maybe substituting the equipment needed to solve certain tasks with the Russian analogues," he said.
Massukh added that the law won’t affect the lives of Russian citizens. "In other words, people won’t feel any changes in the infrastructure. By the way, there might be a little improvement, as the root name servers will be inside the country, there will be a shorter physical distance to reach them," he underlined.
Stable Runet law
On April 16, the State Duma adopted the law on ensuring the stable operation of the Russian Internet segment (Runet) in case the country is disconnected from the global Internet infrastructure in its third reading. The bill was devised and presented by Chairman of the Federation Council Committee on Constitutional Legislation and State Building Andrey Klishas, his First Deputy Lyudmila Bokova and MP Andrei Lugovoy.
According to the law, the Federal Service for Supervision of Communications, Information Technology and Mass Media will be responsible for "the coordination of ensuring the stable, secure and seamless function of the Internet in Russia." It is provided that in case threats to stable Internet operation in Russia arise the service "can exercise centralized control over the communication network of general use." Moreover, the government can determine the types of threats and measures to eliminate them.
If the bill passes all stages of approval, the law will take effect in November 2019, excluding the provisions on cryptographic protection of data and national domain name system, which will come into force on January 1, 2021.