Russia threatens to set up its 'own internet' with China, India and pals – let's take a closer look Russia is intending to set up its "own internet" according to a number of Russian news sources citing a document signed by President Vladimir Putin earlier this month. At a meeting at the end of the October, the Russian Security Council ordered its telecoms ministry to look at a "system of backup DNS root name servers, …
Is it the people who control the DNS you use? Is it the antivirus/malware scanners that list dodgy URLs? What about your 'safe browsing' option - who determines what that or its subcategories actually mean? Who is entrusted with that list once those determinations are made?
OK so that's a very browser-centric set of remarks but everything we do on the net is based on chains of trust. and we shouldn't just give our preferred data sources a free pass just because they are the proverbial local server for local people.
One man's compliance with regulations is another man's dodgy underhand dealing with an evil repressive regime...
Those "alternate roots" are proposed as only accessible by BRICS countries.
It's a hop skip and jump to legislating that residents of these countries are only _allowed_ to use those alternate roots and to enforce that by forcing ISPs to divert port 53 and 5353 traffic to "approved" nameservers.
There are actually a few alternative DNS systems in operation, have a google. I'd be surprised if you could really force people to use a particular server in practice but if they did someone would just create an entirely new DNS system. You could probably even make an http packaged one if you needed to get through proxies.
We ventured into studying the IPv4 address depletion challenge a few years ago leading to a surprise solution that we nicknamed it EzIP (phonetic for Easy IPv4). A proposal has been submitted to IETF:
https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-chen-ati-adaptive-ipv4-address-space-03
Among several useful benefits, the most direct consequence is that EzIP enables the establishment of regional sub-Internets, each capable of serving up to 256M (Millon) IoTs, covering the largest city (Tokyo Metro) or 75% of countries from just one IPv4 public address. This can realize the CIR (Country-based Internet Registry) model from ITU a few years ago, even without establishing a CIR organization.
If a government is not interested, private enterprises can make use of this facility to provide "local Internet" services. Either way, this will be a parallel facility to the existing "global Internet" model, so that citizens will have the flexibility to choose.
Thoughts and comments will be much appreciated.
Abe (2018-09-16 17:30)
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