Ministry of Communications proposes not to release Russian traffic outside the country in order to avoid wiretapping

The new initiative of the Ministry of Communications and Mass Media provides for limiting the routing of Russian traffic. Most of this traffic, according to officials, should remain inside the country. Technical details are listed in the Digital Economy project, which the agency prepared a few days ago, as reported by Izvestia. The authors of the project say that now most of the data from one Runet user goes to another user within the Russian Federation through other countries, which makes it possible to listen to traffic abroad.

The draft says that by 2020, the share of domestic traffic in the Russian segment of the Internet, which goes through foreign servers, should decrease by up to 5%. Now this figure is at least 60%. According to the compilers of the Digital Economy project, it’s impossible to reduce the share of traffic from the Russian Federation that passes through foreign servers to a level below 5% even by 2025, that is, 5% of Russian traffic will in any case go outside the country.

Some part of Russian traffic is inevitably poisoned through servers in other countries. For example, this situation in Kaliningrad and change it for obvious reasons will not work. Therefore, according to Internet ombudsman Dmitry Marinichev, it is unlikely that it will be able to fall below the 5% threshold. “Periodically, a situation arises when two Russian operators start transmitting information flows to each other through foreign traffic exchange points,” said Alexey Platonov, general director of the Internet Technical Center. Now, according to experts, the main routing points of Internet traffic are Frankfurt, Stockholm, Amsterdam. One of the reasons is that the cost of connecting to the network in these regions is about seven times less than in Russia.
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Some experts are convinced of the need to limit the routing of Russian traffic. “The security and stability of Russia's economic development today are inversely related to foreign information technologies, systems and platforms. Traffic is not an exception, you need to strive to localize internal processes, do without foreign servers, ”said Arseny Shcheltsin, director for project activities at the Internet Development Institute.

Rostelecom believes that for Russian providers, changing the routing is not too difficult and not very expensive.

It is worth noting that now the implementation of actions to fulfill the requirements of the Law on Personal Data is in full swing. This law came into force on September 1, 2015, according to him, the personal data of Russian citizens must be stored in the country. The websites of violators of the law must be entered by Roskomnadzor in a special register. The number of foreign companies that agreed to meet the requirements of the law include Twitter, HSBC, Citi, Raiffeisen, Rosbank (part of the Societe Generale group) “Intesa” and Unicredit, trading (Yves Rocher, Avon, Oriflame) and IT companies (Microsoft, HP), as well as the tour operator Pegas and the restaurant chain McDonalds.