Vladimir Putin wants to separate Russia from the Internet to better control the population, and has already begun testing. VPNs have stopped working.
Last week, Russia tested the disconnection from the Internet in some provinces of the country to use its own network, which many are already calling RusNet. Vladimir Putin's experiment was partially successful: many services went down completely, but the blocking of VPNs was almost entirely successful. That was the main objective.
Barely 30 years after the mainstream birth of the Internet, the utopia on which it was founded, a universal communication network that would make us all freer and wiser, is just that, a utopia.
Today the Internet is responsible for extremism, fake news, election manipulation, and other things that are causing us irreparable harm. And soon, it will stop being a universal network: Russia has begun testing to separate itself from the Internet, creating its own network. This will allow it to completely control the population.
The first tests of the Russian Internet: VPNs do not work.
With the invasion of Ukraine, Vladimir Putin has had to invent his own reality, disconnected from the truth, to justify himself to his population, something common to all totalitarian governments.
The problem is that it is complicated to make your people believe one thing if the opposite is said on the Internet. That is why Russia has been investing almost 700 million euros (as far as is known) since 2019, before the invasion of Ukraine but after the invasion of Crimea, to create its own Internet with its own protocols.
This RusNet would not completely break away from the Internet, but would only connect to it through a digital border, censored and monitored by Russia. A digital Berlin Wall, as it is already being called.
The goal is to maintain critical Internet services while preventing VPNs from functioning. This avoids allowing citizens to inform themselves through media not censored by the government. At the same time, it prevents foreign citizens from posing as Russians to spread "Western propaganda."
According to Netblocks, on December 7, the Russian communications regulator, Roskomnadzor, tested the disconnection of the Internet for 24 hours in Dagestan, Chechnya, and Ingushetia, provinces inhabited by ethnic minorities. Their citizens experienced numerous connection problems for hours.
Apparently, essential services such as WhatsApp, Telegram, and YouTube went down. Even Russian services like the search engine Yandex.
However, this Russian disconnection from the Internet caused the vast majority of VPNs, the virtual private networks that serve to hide the IP address (location), to stop working. Even so, some remained operational, according to ISW.
Disconnecting an entire country from the Internet seems like a utopia, especially when that disconnection is not total. It is difficult for Russia to achieve this. And if it does, it remains to be seen whether hackers will be able to bypass this disconnection.
