Russia Successfully Tested Its 'Great Firewall' Internet, Throwing Out Global Connections

Russia has maneuvered several plans, step-by-step, to revamp its technology infrastructure all over the country. Take the “sovereign internet law” published last month as a telling example: the law gives permissions for blocking content if there’s an emergency situation. Recently, President Putin also inked a law that orders electronic devices to be installed Russian apps before hitting the Russian market. However, as far as most of the Russian users are concerned, their country's internet will soon be replaced by an internal network. The news came after the Ministry of Communications of Russia declared that the test for a countrywide alternative has been done successfully, cited by BBC.

Functions of this network aren't clarified enough, but Russian authorities said there was no significant change happening to users' experiences during the test. To iterate, Russia is not the first country that comes up with such an idea. In particular, users in Saudi Arabia, Iran, and especially China have been restricted from accessing some internet services or even the entire global connection for decades, and control the way they communicate with each other via their very own infrastructures.

Similar to these, Russia's Runet will act as a content filter to censor what the government doesn't want Russian citizens to get through. In a statement to BBC, a professor said Runet would require telcos and ISPs to reconstruct the internet configuration within their borders like what a company usually does to its intranet. This infrastructure type is even said to approach blocked content via VPNs. Based on these predictions, it's blurry to value the extent of this test as well as how far Russia will go with this Great Firewall of sorts.