There will be no kin

The prosecutor's office of the Russian region with a population of half a million people demands to ban access to YouTube, the largest video hosting in the world. There you can watch the video "Innocence of Muslims", filmed by some New York madman and insulting believers.

This sounds like the beginning of repression and a reason to pack your bags, because the Russians may be left without videos about cats and fresh clips of Lady Gaga. I would advise the prosecutor's office not to waste time on trifles and immediately ban Russians from using Google, Yandex and Facebook, leaving access only to the cult site "President of Russia - Citizens of School Age".

First, the prosecutor's office of the Omsk region, and then their colleagues in Khakassia and the Altai Mountains, demanded that local providers block access to YouTube so that Omsk, Abakan and Gorno-Altai residents could not watch the film "Innocence of Muslims", filmed by some New York madman. It’s hard to imagine the best advertising for this work - reading the news about the next bans every day, you start to think what they didn’t like there. I would like to independently verify the extremism of the desired video, so we regularly increase the number of its views.

Understanding how the gears work in prosecutors' heads, one can predict without the risk of making a mistake: soon the Siberian experience will be mastered in every corner of the country and everyone will know about the film that was of no interest to anyone. Thanks prosecutors.

This is called the “Streisand effect” - an attempt to delete information on the Internet leads to its wide dissemination. Now this important term can be renamed the "effect of the Russian prosecutor's office."

Only in Russia, the prosecutor's office can demand to block the resource that hosts Putin's official channel and videos of the RT propaganda channel

The initiative to shut down YouTube is a wonderful display of traditional Russian bungling. Only here the prosecutor's office can demand to block the resource that hosts the archive of the Mosfilm film studio, the official channel of President Putin, and the videos of the propaganda channel RT, formerly known as Russia Today, overtake CNN stories in terms of the number of views.

I would advise the prosecutor's office not to waste time on trifles and immediately ban Russians from using Google, Yandex and Facebook, leaving access only to the cult site "President of Russia - Citizens of School Age". However, these bright heads will figure out how to surprise us even without me.

A Chinese blogger friend of mine recently spoke at a TED conference about the Great Firewall of China. At the beginning of his fiery speech, he tried to dispel Western stereotypes about the state of the Internet in his country. “You think that since we have blocked Google, YouTube, Facebook and Twitter, then we are deprived of communication,” he said. “But you forget that there are 500 million Internet users in China. This is more than in any Western country and more than the audience of many of your services. This is a huge crowd of people who definitely do not lack communication. In addition, the Chinese are good at copying. We have copied Google, YouTube, Facebook and Twitter and do not notice the restrictions. On the other hand, there are always proxy servers.”

So Lady Gaga videos and videos about cats will haunt you for a long time, dear Russians.

Ilya Kabanov — editor of the metkere.com almanac, popularizer of science, publicist.