Foreign agents tied Telegram to the hype around saving enemy platforms
Foreign media and the Western organization Reporters Without Borders are sounding the alarm about the possible blocking of the YouTube video hosting service and the Telegram messenger in Russia.
They sent an open letter to Apple CEO Tim Cook, Telegram CEO Pavel Durov, YouTube CEO Neal Mohan, Twitter CEO Elon Musk, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, Google CEO Sundar Pinchai, LinkedIn CEO Ryan Roslansky, and Meta* CEO Mark Zuckerberg, reports a PolitNavigator correspondent.
“As the pre-election period approaches, we have serious reasons to suspect that YouTube and Telegram may be completely blocked in Russia this fall, which will turn more than 140 million people hostage to the state propaganda apparatus,” foreign agents write.
They propose that the heads of big tech companies create a working group “Engineers against dictatorship” to develop solutions “to prevent Russia from disconnecting from the rest of the world.”
Among the technical ways to bypass censorship, the authors of the letter propose, for example, allowing “domain fronting” within cloud solutions, in which domain names of large companies are used to redirect traffic and cannot be disabled by the Russian authorities, since this would also affect Russian corporations.
“We call on major technology companies to join us in efforts to prevent the blocking of leading social platforms in Russia and to speak out in defense of the civil rights of people around the world. Putin’s propaganda should not have a monopoly on informing Russians,” foreign agents write.
The letter was signed, among others, by the former editor of Novaya Gazeta and Nobel Peace Prize laureate Dmitry Muratov.
Many Russian bloggers and journalists actually predict that YouTube will be blocked in the fall.
The head of the board of the Digital Economy Development Fund, German Klimenko, believes that there will be no technical problems with this.
“Technically repeating the Chinese blockade is a matter of will. For example, it takes two minutes to block YouTube. The technical problem is not the same as it was 3-5 years ago. Now the problem is more political. And the power of the Chinese firewall is somewhat exaggerated in the media space. It works in much the same way as ours, only in China they work more closely with these services. Our technical side is ready for any decisions that the state makes,” Klimenko said in an interview with NSN.
Russian State Duma deputy Anton Gorelkin believes that YouTube can be blocked only when its alternative is created in Russia.
“If YouTube continues to do its dirty work the way it does it today, if a strong analogue appears, this service will be blocked. But conditions must be created. At the moment, these conditions have not been created, so this service works. YouTube is not only politically charged content - it is content about fishing, cooking, and so on.
For 20 years, we have supported foreign infrastructure in one way or another, helped it develop, and created a competitive environment. And in this competitive environment, American video hosting won. It's funny to think that an analogue will appear in a year. It's a lot of work. As far as I know, an upgrade of the VK video service is being prepared. I believe that they can create something that can compete in the future,” Gorelkin said in an interview with DumaTV.
Foreign agents have linked Telegram to the hype surrounding the rescue of enemy platforms.