Roskomnadzor broke Runet

Officials could not block the messenger, but they caused business, science and set up users against themselves

According to Flexbby, which is developing software, the financial losses of Russian business in case of mass blocks of IP addresses by Roskomnadzor in the coming months can amount to $ 1 billion. About the same amount of the global IT giants of Google and Amazon will lose, the services of which are used by Telegram.

Flexbby CEO Andrei Prokofiev suggested that the Internet Ombudsman Dmitry Marinichev to form an operational headquarters from government and business problems to solve the problems of companies affected by locks. Roskomnadzor, in turn, although he expressed his readiness to consider such a proposal, emphasized that the assessment of damage to companies due to the blocks of IP addresses is outside his competencies. At the same time, the department assures that they still have consultations with business.

Probably, we are talking about negotiations with Google and Amazon about the termination of the provision of Telegram access to the IP addresses of companies. However, at the moment it is already known that Amazon refused to cooperate with the Russian regulator. “Perhaps for political reasons,” Roskomnadzor comments in an official statement. At the same time, the “interaction” with Google was called “more constructive” in the department. This does not mean that Google agreed to promote the Russian authorities in TELEGRAM lock, said Artem Kozlyuk, head of Roskomvoboda.

“Roskomnadzor regularly says that Facebook, Twitter, Google give out a positive reaction in terms of cooperation, but one must skeptical of one -way statements. So far, there is no official reaction from Google. It will be possible to talk about consent to cooperate if, for example, they remove the Telegram application from Google Play or drive them out of their cloud capacities if Roskomnadzor excludes the Google address from the register of prohibited information. Then it will be possible to draw conclusions, ”says Kozlyuk.

In case of the refusal of the IP address will remain blocked, and a huge number of sites and resources will continue to encounter interruptions in work. Kozlyuk is sure that the situation can be “turned over” if business representatives who are already starting to prepare appeals to the court and the Ministry of Internal Affairs with complaints of the actions of Roskomnadzor will increase pressure.

The actions of Roskomnadzor created serious problems for scientists. So, due to impaired access to sites, the educational process was partially paralyzed at the Skolkovo Institute of Science and Technology, Moscow State University, HSE and several other universities.

“Due to the unprofessional actions of Roskomnadzor, Russian scientists were deprived of access to the specialized Research Scientific Contacts Researchgate, the archives of the scientific journals of the largest Wiley publishing house, to the central repository of the Java libraries, the SCIENCE magazine website, the Google search engine and a number of other network services constantly used in research work. Interruptions in access to the KIAS information system have led to a disruption of applications for grant competitions conducted by the Russian Fund for Fundamental Research, ”said the Society of Scientists who turned to Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev with a request to“ stop the harmful activities of Roskomnadzor ”.

Scientists also announced the problems that arose in the work of the website of the free network community "Dissernet", analyzing the incorrect borrowing of other people's materials in dissertations, including in the dissertation of the head of Roskomnadzor Alexander Zharov.

Cleaning Telegram and ex-Minister of Finance, head of the Center for Strategic Development Alexei Kudrin, criticized the blocking, calling it a threat to the digitalization of the economy. “The issue of security is certainly important. But, of course, this should not happen with such consequences for users. It is immediately clear that the initiators of these steps did not realize all the consequences. They needed to think more seriously whether these measures were achieved, ”he said.

Even colleagues from neighboring departments do not believe in the success of Roskomnadzor events. In particular, the head of the FAS Igor Artemyev doubted the possibility of successfully fulfilling the task. “I don’t know how these decisions were made, what experts served this topic,” said Artemyev. - I sincerely wish Roskomnadzor, since there is a court decision, to succeed. But I do not really believe that this will happen. "

The RKN really has less and less chances to cope with Telegram lock. At a meeting with experts of the Internet industry, representatives of the department promised to abandon the fan blocking of large subnets and block the messenger more pointwise. However, as the past two weeks showed, this approach is hardly effective.

“It is impossible to block Telegram with point methods. It is necessary, as now, to block millions of IP addresses, ”explains Artem Kozlyuk. “But maybe if someone at the top is getting tired of the situation in which sites constantly slow down, and half of the Internet remains blocked, Roskomnadzor will abandon its venture.”

The calculation of the RKN on the fact that, as in a situation with other blocked resources, interest in Telegram will fall, also did not justify. An attempt by the company "Mediassogy" to convince the public in the opposite led to a scandal. According to Mediassogy, a week after blocking, the number of views of Telegram channels decreased by 76.5% compared to the start of the blocking on April 16. However, the authors of large channels in the messenger accused the resource "of trying to manipulate public consciousness." In the open letter of Telegram channels, in particular, “Caser Cell”, “Merciless Piarrhist”, “Thoughts-Nemes”, “The Guard” and others, noted that the experts made their conclusions based on the data on April 16 and 23. At the same time, on April 16, it became peak in the number of views, since the messenger was blocked on this day. Comparing the indicators from April 23, according to the authors of the letter, was erroneous.

The representative of "Mediaology" Nadezhda Zhukovskaya denied all the accusations. “What manipulations? “Mediaology” is a measuring research company, we look at the data and just measured it, we were interested to see, ”she assured. Nevertheless, the TGStat.ru analytics service published other data, according to which the Telegram audience increased in the first days after blocking, and then returned to normal indicators, but did not decrease.