The Kremlin’s war on streaming: How Russia is moving to block YouTube and why its efforts may bring down the entire Runet

Recently, officials in Russia have increasingly experimented with packet filtering to restrict access to specific websites and applications at will, without a trial and even without announcing the restrictions. There is no legal framework in Russia governing the rules for blocking or throttling websites via deep packet inspection (DPI) tools, but this appears to be of little concern to the authorities.

For nearly a month, officials and politicians have been at odds over the issues surrounding YouTube in Russia. In mid-July, Rostelecom, Russia’s largest state-controlled digital services provider, reported that the quality of YouTube streaming for all Russians had begun to deteriorate due to equipment degradation.

Anton Gorelkin, deputy head of the State Duma's Committee on Information Policy, was of the same opinion. He claimed that the blame lies entirely with Google, which does not maintain its Russian servers. “As for YouTube, the reason for the deterioration of its speed and quality is entirely on the conscience of Google, which stopped maintaining its caching services in Russia. It is impossible to stop this process without the company's participation, but I don't see any point in accelerating it either: the more natural the flow of the Russian audience to domestic platforms, the better,” Gorelkin wrote on his Telegram channel.

However, Alexander Khinshtein, head of the same Duma committee and mouthpiece of Russia’s technological censorship movement, said that by the end of July 2024, YouTube's download speed on desktop computers would drop sharply — for political reasons. He attributed the blame for Russian action aimed at impeding YouTube’s performance to the obstinacy of the American company, making it clear that Moscow’s threats of slowdowns and shutdowns are being used as a tool to pressure the California-based firm.

“It's no coincidence that [the government] chose to bring YouTube to its senses precisely during the summer period, when the bulk of people are on vacation and use mobile devices to access the Internet. The degradation of YouTube will not affect them in any way, but the resource itself will see with its own eyes that the [Russian] state has moved from words to tangible steps,” he said in late July.