UPDATE: PM says Russia not to copy China in Internet restrictions

(Adds comments in last three paragraphs)

MOSCOW, Mar 29 (PRIME) -- Russia will not impose the same restrictions on the local Internet as China, Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev said on Friday.

“Of course, we won’t have such regulation as in China. I’ll say even more, this regulation in China does not often bring the results it was supposed to achieve. Moreover, we don’t want it, there is no firewall,” Medvedev said during a live broadcast on social network VKontakte.

The State Duma, the parliament’s lower house, approved in February in the first out of three mandatory readings a bill on protection of the Runet in case of a threat from abroad. An explanatory note read that the document had been drafted because of the aggressive mood of the U.S. National Cyber Strategy adopted in 2018.

“We must protect our interests so that it’d be not us to cut something off, but so that we’d not be disconnected. It is also possible. The Internet is not just a news feed, but a great deal of technologies, including the industrial Internet, the medical Internet. What if we find ourselves one day cut off from the rest of the world?” Medvedev said.

It is technologically “complicated, but feasible,” he said.

“It could be done for sure, this is why we should make our segment of the Internet sustainable, and it was the aim of the bill.”

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