Russia Wants Its Own Internet - BRICKS Should Create an Alternative System to the Current Web
58 percent said yes. These are the results of a survey by the Russian Public Opinion Research Center about whether Russia needs its own Internet. Or rather not only Russia. It’s about creating an isolated network for the BRICS countries. On the one hand, it's understandable. They're the most important economic, and, to some extent, political partners. If we are to unite with anyone in a separate network, it should be with them. On the other hand, there are those who want to add a couple of participants to such project, namely Belarus and Kazakhstan. They say that together we'll be able to protect ourselves from international hackers. And the overall security level will be higher.
At the same time, the difference between cities and small towns is obvious. If we compare the countryside with Moscow and St. Petersburg, then, among the former, 61% of respondents were in favor of isolation, and in the latter group, only 39%. Residents of both capitals turned out to be scared of limiting access to some resources. This is a theory, no one has spoken about putting it into practice.
Yevgeny Tishkovets will talk about whether we should.
- Yevgeny, hello!
- Hello.
- Some time ago, they were talking about Cheburashka.
Alexei, we know nothing now about the fate of this project. However, some Chinese projects show that there's nothing impossible.
The cybersecurity issue is becoming more acute every year. Almost every day, we hear about hacker attacks on the websites of different banks, firms, and even government agencies. In 2016, as a result of the biggest attack, the world's biggest websites went offline for several hours. Transnational corporations lose dozens of millions of dollars.
The Internet is a powerful weapon in the hackers' hands. According to statistics, in 2/3 of all cases, data is stolen through the Internet and cloud services. There's one more reason to think whether the Internet is secure and if it's a common heritage.
The thing is that the technical coordination of the Internet's work is handled by one company, ICANN, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, and it's quite clearly registered in Los Angeles, California, the US. At its time, the US government participated in its creation.
In fact, the Internet's entire architecture is based on a very limited territory. The world's internet users get their access to the Internet through DNS servers. This is a decentralized data storage system, on which the Internet's work depends, as it contains all domain names and their IP addresses. After a user enters the URL in their browser, it's DNS that allows the computer to ascertain the IP address of the required resource and to send the request there. The US has almost the same number of such servers as the EU. Asia and Africa have a significantly smaller number of servers. Brazil has 24, Russia has 11. But that's not the main indicator.
13 providers maintain these servers, and most of them are foreign. So, if someone wants to deny all of Russia internet access, there are technical capabilities to theoretically do this.
Anton Fishman, Group-IB department head: "By making changes to DNS, regardless of the type, one can make specific addresses unavailable. For example, ones serving Russia. For some time, the Internet will be partly unavailable for some users. Or they'll be redirected to some malicious nodes such as fishing websites or others that can cause damage. This can be prevented by creating an integrated reserve backup system."
Can we create our own safe Internet segment? Yes, China showed how it's done. China increased the number of DNS servers and made its Internet segment more stable. But it introduced some limitations. The Golden Shield Project limits access to some undesirable international websites, makes it impossible to publish news from foreign sources without special permission, and controls the filtering of websites.
These limits might seem to bring harm, but this doesn't happen. The country needs to create good substitutes to popular international websites that will be popular back home. And they managed to do it in China. One of the functions of a local messenger, for example, allows seeing other users that are close to the user and want to talk in real life.
So, Alexei, the provision of security can be both profitable and facilitating.
- Thank you. Yevgeny Tishkovets told us about isolating the Internet.