Russia is planning to disconnect itself from the Internet as part of a planned experiment that is mean't to ensure that Russia's Internet can stay independent in case the rest of the world decides to disconnect the country from the Internet.
This experiment is to be carried out so as to gather insight and provide feedback and modifications to a proposed law that stated that Russia Internet service providers should ensure the independence of the Russian Internet space (Runnet) in case foreign foreign aggressors wants to disconnect the country off the Internet.
According to Russian news agency RosBiznesKonsalting (RBK), Russian Internet providers will have to install "technical means" to re-route all Russian Internet traffic to exchange points or points managed by Russia's telecom watchdog, Roskomnazor.
Also Read: Israeli Spies Hacked Kaspersky, And Caught Russian Spies Hacking American Spies
The aim of this is to force all Russian traffic to use the country's servers and stay within the country. Roskomnazor will filter the traffic so as to block prohibited contents, and it will also ensure that Russian traffic doesn't go via servers abroad where it can be snooped upon.
This will be done in a similar way as it is in China.
This project has been in the works for years now. Russian authorities even have a local backup of the Domain Name System (DNS) which was tested in 2014 and in 2018. Russian officials in 2017 said that by 2020 they should be able to route 95% of the country's Internet traffic locally.
For now, a date for the test hasn't been revealed, though the test is expected to be carried out before April 1, which is the deadline for submitting amendments to the law which is known as the Digital Economy national Program.
Also Read: Russian faces 3 Years Jail term for playing Pokemon Go in church
Though major Russian telcos such as MegaFon, Beeline, MTS, RosTelecom, and others have all agree with the new law, they however don't agree with the technical implementation which they believe would cause major service disruption to Russian Internet traffic.
The Russian government has agreed to cover the cost of ISPs re-modifying their structure and installing new servers to point all Internet traffic to exchange points managed by Roskomnazor.
This move by Russia is to have a fully working country-wide Intranet in case NATO countries, who have been accusing them of carrying out various cyber-attacks decides to cut them off from the Internet.