Russia slowly trying to splinter its internet from rest of world, analysts say | Russia
Activists and experts say Russia is in the midst of a massive, slow-moving effort to isolate its internet from the rest of the world, with serious consequences for the millions of people whose internet is slowly being cut off.
Unlike Iran’s internet shutdowns earlier this year, Russia’s internet shutdown is a piecemeal and non-transparent effort. This situation is defined by increased mobile internet disruptions across cities and states, increased restrictions on certain types of traffic, and new blocks on Telegram, a messaging application indispensable for communication and daily life for most Russians.
“This is a step backwards, a step back 100 years. Soon they can switch to paper mail, telegraphs and horses,” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said. wrote About blocks in X.
Arturo Filastò, a researcher at the Open Observatory on Network Interference (OONI), a watchdog of internet censorship, said Russia’s shutdown was “a little more transparent and less visible” than Iran’s. This is because Russia’s internet infrastructure is more decentralized compared to Iran, making widespread censorship difficult to implement. “There are a lot more internet service providers that are operating and managing their networks a little bit more independently,” Filasto said.
The shutdown relies on government-mandated equipment deployed across different networks with varying levels of effectiveness. Data from OONI since March 20 shows that Telegram is increasingly being blocked, and research conducted on more than 500 different networks indicates widespread interference with the service.
“I’m going to the pigeon police station” in question A Russian internet user in the video published by a Belarusian TV channel. “I pay for the internet and I feel like I’m being robbed every month. They take my damn money and I don’t get the benefits of civilization!”
Analysts at Amnezia VPN, which produces tools to bypass censorship, say the Telegram blocks are more comprehensive and indicate greater technical capability than Russia’s previous efforts to censor the platform. Moscow and St. They described access problems in 15 regions, including St. Petersburg.
They said censors “blocked more crudely and on a much larger scale, no longer worried that things might get corrupted or get out of control.”
This will probably become more evident. Russian authorities have elsewhere suggested they would block Telegram entirely from the beginning of April, with the head of Russia’s Rostelecom saying in March that WhatsApp was “dead” and Telegram would soon follow. It looks like both will be replaced by Max, a new government-controlled local messaging service.
Russia has also been shutting down mobile networks across large parts of the country for at least a year, allowing access only to a “whitelist” of pre-approved sites.
Mobile internet in Moscow city center was completely shut down earlier this month, causing widespread outage as users were unable to access banking services or make phone calls.
Russian retailers reported increased sales of pagers, paper maps and mobile phones as people tried to beat gridlock.
For much of the last year, shutdowns and other forms of internet censorship were concealed by official excuses and plausible deniability, Amnezia and Filastò said. Initially, authorities justified mobile internet blackouts, which were often limited to remote areas, by saying they were to protect against Ukrainian drones.
Amnesia analysts say previous mobile internet outages were a test and censors carefully enforced them, trying to minimize damage to businesses.
Now, “it looks like updates will be released as soon as they are ready,” they said, and the Russian telecommunications authority, Roskomnazdor, is “testing how the economy will function under strict restrictions at any time of the year.”
“According to our forecasts, shutdowns in Moscow will become more or less routine,” they said.
Although authorities have not yet shut down home networks, they have the technology to do so and may do so soon. “We observed similar shutdowns in Iran and can draw conclusions about how this could be implemented in Russia,” analysts said.
