Roskomnadzor is taking new measures to completely block the Telegram messenger in Russia, but so far efforts have failed. Fully blocking the messenger can only disable the entire Internet in the country, experts state
From Monday, 16 in April, telecom operators in Russia began to block access to information systems and programs of Telegram Messenger LLP (owns the e-mail messenger). This is done at the direction of Roskomnadzor (RKN), which executes the decision of the Tagansky District Court: on April 13, he decided to limit access to Telegram in the country due to the fact that the messenger did not fulfill the law entrusted to him by the FSB to decrypt the user's correspondence. The founder of Telegram, Pavel Durov, stated that he considers this requirement of the law incompatible "with the protection of privacy and the privacy policy" of the messenger.
Almost immediately after the instructions of Roskomnadzor, the messenger became unavailable to subscribers of large telecom operators, but during the day, a number of users had access to the service restored. At the same time, in the process of fighting Telegram, problems began to appear with access to unrelated sites and services. RBC figured out what was happening.
Why can't I block Telegram?
Initially, Pavel Durov promised that the service will use "built-in methods to bypass locks that do not require actions from users." Although it warned that the 100% availability of the service without VPN (Virtual Private Network, virtual private network) is not guaranteed.
VPN, along with proxy servers, Tor service and other similar means, allow the user to be on the network anonymously, which makes it possible to open resources blocked in a particular country.
According to RKN, in order to support the work of the messenger without the installation of such tools by users, Telegram began to actively change IP addresses using new addresses from Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud. Roskomnadzor enters new IP addresses into the register and blocks access to them from Russia, but the messenger immediately switches to a new pool of addresses. As the general director of Qrator Labs Alexander Lyamin noted, Telegram has excellent engineers who are now "exploiting all the flaws and vulnerabilities of the filtration system used in Russia."
How long can this go on?
On Monday, Roskomnadzor publicly reminded the owners of VPNs and proxy servers that they must execute court decisions on the blocking of prohibited resources. As stated by the representative of the department, they will take "all necessary measures to enforce the court decision, including those related to restricting access to Internet resources that provide technical conditions for the operation of Telegram services."
At the same time, Roskomnadzor continued to actively add new IP addresses used by Telegram to the registry of prohibited ones. By the middle of the day of Tuesday, April 17, there were already more than 15,6 million IP addresses in the list, most of which were registered on Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud. Most of these addresses are no longer used by Telegram, but the blocking of access to them from Russia does not happen automatically. Amazon and Google will have to negotiate with the RKN to lift the ban, but it is not known how long it will take.
According to Alexander Lyamin, with sufficient motivation and resources, Telegram can invent new methods and bypass blocking for a very long time. “Firstly, there are a lot of cloud services besides Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud. There are Azure, Cloudflare, DigitalOcean, ProfitBricks and other small ones. In addition, there is always the option to create a new transport protocol based on the principles of decentralization - where each Telegram client is a node of a self-organizing network. The only question is the amount of resources Durov has and his willingness to spend money on this, ”Lyamin said. According to him, maintaining the service is quite costly for Durov. The expert believes that the founder of Telegram can directly and indirectly lose up to $ 1 million per day.At the same time, Lyamin recalls that Durov recently raised $ 1,7 billion on ICO (initial coin offering - the initial placement of cryptocurrency coins or tokens, tokens that give their owners have certain rights) of their TON blockchain platform, that is, should not be limited in funds.
Another opinion from Vladimir Ivanov. He believes that Pavel Durov needs no more than $ 0,5 – 1 thousand per month for juggling IP addresses in the current style. However, given the fact that Roskomnadzor began to block entire data centers and even groups of cloud data centers, such a strategy may allow the messenger to remain available in Russia only from a few weeks to a month. “I think Telegram is now hard at work on a messenger version based on the peer-to-peer protocol, which is almost impossible to block,” Ivanov said.
On Tuesday, April 17, Pavel Durov announced that he intends to support the work of the messenger in Russia. “Although the Russian market does not constitute a significant share of the Telegram user base (it accounts for less than 10% of the total number of service users. - RBC), it is important to us for personal reasons,” said the founder of the messenger. He also said that he had started paying Bitcoin grants to administrators of proxies and VPNs “within the framework of digital resistance - a decentralized movement in defense of digital freedoms and progress”. During this year, Durov intends to donate "millions of dollars in personal funds for these purposes."
Who suffers from this?
As Pavel Durov stated, "the quality of life of 15 million Russians will deteriorate, since Telegram without a VPN may at times be unavailable." According to MediaScope, in February (latest data) in Russia, 9,9 million people visited the Telegram website or mobile application at least once a month among residents of cities with a population of more than 100 thousand. For comparison: WhatsApp's figure was 24,9 million users, Viber has 20,8 million.
Blocking the IP addresses of Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud has already led to the fact that some of the IP addresses that used them, but not related to Telegram sites, were unavailable. Perhaps this is due to the fact that the RKN blocks large groups of IP addresses. According to Alexander Lyamin, medium and small businesses in Russia are suffering the most from the situation, which, in order to save, usually does not deploy its IT infrastructure, but uses cloud providers. For example, Skyeng’s online school for learning English has a significant portion of the IT infrastructure used by Amazon Web Services. As a result, 16 April, many students could not contact their teachers. Managing partner Skyeng Alexander Laryanovsky estimated the direct damage from failed lessons in the amount of about 2 million rubles.
According to Artem Kozlyuk, head of the Roskomsvoboda organization that fights for digital rights, expanding the list of banned sites could negatively affect telecom operators. “Filtering millions of IP addresses can lead to slower data transfer rates. Filtration equipment has its limit in terms of the amount of resources, upon passing through which operators may need to change it, ”says Kozlyuk. A representative of a large telecom operator confirmed that the expansion of the register of prohibited resources can indeed affect the speed of Internet access, especially for small operators. The system limit, he said, has not yet been tested. However, at the time of publication, none of the major operators reported such problems.
How can I disable Telegram completely?
According to independent telecommunications expert Alexei Semenyaka, Roskomnadzor has gone to principle and wants to repeat the "feat" with Zello, a mobile radio that has also actively used new IP addresses on Amazon Web Services to bypass blocking in Russia. However, after Amazon Web Services approached Zello with a request to stop using their site, the service began to look for other ways to bypass the blocking. According to Semenyaka, Roskomnadzor is trying to put pressure on Amazon Web Services, which may have significant financial losses due to blocking, so that the service stops working with Telegram. At the same time, the expert admitted that Amazon Web Services could terminate the contract with Durov, but made a reservation that the company would weigh political, commercial and reputational risks. However, given the fact that there are many cloud providers, Telegram can "run" from Roskomnadzor for a very long time. At least until the moment when he finds a less expensive way to bypass the lock.
“It is probably possible to make Telegram inconvenient to use, and thereby reduce its audience in Russia. But Roskomnadzor and telecom operators will not be able to completely block Telegram in Russia so that no one uses it at all. This is possible only if the Internet is introduced in Russia according to white lists (that is, if access is allowed only to a limited number of “verified” sites - RBC), ”says Alexey Semenyaka. The filtering equipment installed by operators simply cannot “parse” the traffic and isolate from it the one that goes through the protocols used by proxy servers and VPNs; this will require very expensive network equipment.
According to Artem Kozlyuk, to completely block Telegram on the territory of Russia is possible only with all the Internet.