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Russia to require Internet providers to share users’ address locations in effort to draw ‘digital border’ around country

Russia’s federal censorship agency, Roskomnadzor, plans to create a database of the geolocations of Russian users’ IP addresses, according to a draft order published on the government’s portal of draft regulations.

An explanatory note attached to the draft defines the project’s goal as “the collection of information about the country (geographical) affiliation of IP networks.” Roskomnadzor said the measure is necessary to better protect Russian government websites from DDoS attacks, which have become more frequent since 2022. Alexey Amelkin, the president of the Makatel Cable Television Operators’ Association, said it’s possible that Roskomnadzor’s Public Communication Network Monitoring and Management Center (TsMU) hopes to replace the Netherlands’ RIPE NCC as Russia’s regional Internet registry, which would allow it to further isolate the RuNet from the larger web. According to Filipp Kulin, the co-founder of the anti-website-blocking project Usher II, the Russian authories likely want to use the geolocation data to conduct investigations or confiscate equipment.

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