Sovereign Internet Law
2019 amendments to Russian Internet legislation
The Sovereign Internet Law (Russian: Закон о «суверенном интернете») is the informal name for a set of 2019 amendments to existing Russian legislation that mandate Internet surveillance and grants the Russian government powers to partition Russia from the rest of the Internet, including the creation of a national fork of the Domain Name System.
In a statement released by the State Legal Department on March 13, 2019, the federal law was aimed at "suppressing the dissemination of unreliable socially significant information under the guise of reliable messages that creates a threat of harm to the life and (or) health of citizens, property, a threat of massive disruption of public order and (or) public safety, or a threat of interfering with the functioning or termination of the functioning of facilities life support, transport or social infrastructure, credit institutions, energy facilities, industry and communications."
The system was tested on 6 July 2023, and possibly tested again on February 27, 2024. On December 10, 2024, the system got tested for a whole day in the Chechnya region.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Sovereign Internet Law” is 2019 amendments to Russian Internet legislation. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Sovereign, Internet and amendments, not as a finished interpretation.
Why this record matters
The phrase “2019 amendments to Russian Internet legislation” supplies a clear boundary for inquiry. It also exposes the unanswered questions: who defined that boundary, when it became stable and which sources sit outside it.
The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 28, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q63248168. None of the 1 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 2019, 2023 and 2024.
A concise general-reference account can conceal disagreements about scope, terminology or the weight assigned to individual sources. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
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Three-step research path
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- Test the account: compare the strongest cited source with the responsible institution’s current record and note any disagreement.
Questions for further research
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This entry incorporates text from “Sovereign Internet Law” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.