The Guardian reports on the Russian government pushing for control of the internet inside Russian using Cyrillic characters not just to sit on top of the web pages – but controlling things at a domain level.

The issue here is that the Russian suffix .ru tranliterates into Cyrillic as .py or Paraguay’s domain name. Icann confirms that Russia is looking for the .rf domain name to make a Russian-cyrillic-character internet interoperable with the latin character net. Additionally, without a transliterating suffix, the result would be an non-interconnected Russia internet.

The development may involve Russia having its own root servers which would give the Russian government direct control over that part of the web. It could potentially issue passwords for people to obtain permission to access the global part of the web outside of Russia – or inside for that matter.

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