Traffic speeds reveal that Russia’s YouTube slowdown is targeted throttling, not Google Global Cache ‘equipment failure’

On July 12, Russian telecommunications officials warned that YouTube upload and download speeds are slowing nationwide, supposedly due to failures of the Google Global Cache equipment used to ensure fluid access to Google services in Russia. In an interview with Meduza, I.T. expert Mikhail Klimarev explained that the equipment Google left in Russia to operate its Global Cache is indeed aging, but more recent information measuring Russian Internet traffic speeds indicates that the authorities are throttling YouTube specifically. Additionally, a source in Russia’s telecommunications industry confirmed to Meduza that the government actually started slowing YouTube speeds on July 11, initially limiting its experiment to the ISPs Rostelecom and Tele2. (The news website Gazeta.ru later reported that two of its sources say the state authorities plan to block YouTube outright, beginning in September.) Here’s what we know about Russia’s covert YouTube crackdown.

Roskomnadzor has throttled specific Internet services before. In March 2021, the agency started experimenting with slowing Twitter traffic (after several months, it scaled back these efforts). In February 2022, immediately after the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Roskomnadzor began throttling Facebook. Earlier today, on July 12, federal lawmakers revealed that the government is now slowing access to WhatsApp amid the instant messenger’s refusal to enforce Russian censorship orders.

In April 2021, researchers at the University of Michigan reported that the Russian authorities were throttling Twitter access through special-purpose deep-packet-inspection boxes (known as TSPU, or “technical-solution-for-threat-countermeasures,” devices) that are installed at Internet service providers. This technology allows Roskomnadzor to centralize more censorship control than was previously possible with the “middleboxes” that ISPs use to implement the agency’s blocklists. According to the researchers’ findings, Twitter-related domains triggered Roskomnadzor’s throttler, dropping data packets traveling faster than 128 kilobits per second. (Capped at this speed, it would take more than 18 hours to load a single 1-gigabyte video file.)

Available evidence indicates that Roskomnadzor is now using this technology to throttle YouTube traffic. According to ValdikSS, a blogger who coauthored the paper described above and the founder of GoodbyeDPI (software designed to bypass DPI-based Internet censorship), almost all ISPs in Russia are now slowing access to YouTube through the domain *.googlevideo.com, but this filtration hasn’t yet affected Google IP addresses, including the IP addresses of Google Global Cache’s servers.

“It’s either a technical mistake or a feature they didn’t take into account,” ValdikSS explained on a forum where experts discuss Internet censorship. “Of course, there are zero technical problems with the equipment’s operation,” he added, rejecting the official explanation offered by Rostelecom, Russia’s biggest telecommunications company. ValdikSS also shared the results of his tests measuring data transfer speeds in cities across Russia, showing that googlevideo transfer speeds had collapsed in most areas (though less so in Moscow), while transfers involving Google domains not associated with YouTube were far higher.