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

Moreover, the GGC servers are aging, and the Russian authorities are now trying to use this as an excuse for YouTube’s deteriorating performance. Even without a YouTube shutdown, the streaming workload would eventually fall on Russian operators. In 2023, as reported by ComNews, Google offered a solution: instead of relying on cache servers, operators could establish a direct peering either in Moscow or St. Petersburg to maintain quality access to Google services.

While a number of backbone operators, including Rostelecom, have begun implementing this solution, some telecom experts believe it will mainly benefit users in central Russia, with content playback quality likely to decline for those in other regions.

Moreover, according to Klimarev, while Google's imported servers are of high quality, many were installed several years ago, meaning their service life is already nearing its end.

And other threats to the Russian Internet may be approaching from a different angle. On August 7, Computerra reported that Valery Talyarovsky, the bankruptcy trustee for Google LLC in Russia (ООО «Гугл»), suggested that caching servers might be seized as part of Google's debt settlement to its Russian subsidiary in an ongoing bankruptcy case. A year ago, telecom operators and State Duma MPs debated the possibility of seizing these servers — according to ComNews, the operators were able to convince the politicians not to take this action as part of the proceedings against the American company.

Instead, Roskomnadzor might attempt to use these servers for more effective blocking. On August 8, the Russian newspaper Kommersant reported that the state communications watchdog Roskomnadzor requested telecom operators to hand over Google's caching servers’ subnet IP addresses, along with other data on them. With this data, Roskomnadzor could block traffic from these servers in Russia, potentially preventing even those videos that currently play in normal quality from being accessed.

VPNs remain key — and scammers rear their ugly head

Since YouTube is being slowed down through so-called “technical means of countering threats” (TSPU), as detailed by The Insider in October 2023, methods of blocking, and consequently ways to bypass them, are often not obvious, even to seasoned anti-censorship experts. The primary tool for users to combat Roskomnadzor’s efforts in Russia are Virtual Private Networks (VPNs) — particularly those equipped with advanced censorship circumvention features.

It has become evident that when Roskomnadzor employs TSPU to block websites, their specialists focus on several factors. First, they target the protocols used to transmit data, which is how they have successfully blocked access to services like Telegram and certain VPNs like OpenVPN and WireGuard.

Second, they block specific IP addresses that users attempt to access. This is how blocking worked even before the TSPU, when Roskomnadzor simply sent service providers the IP addresses and domains which users were banned from accessing. Now, Roskomnadzor employees have the ability to independently add IP addresses to internet filters at any time and in any combination, with no transparency or oversight regarding the criteria for these decisions. For instance, on August 7, Roskomnadzor began intermittently blocking certain IP addresses used for content distribution, rendering some bypass tools ineffective.

Google uses thousands of IP addresses to distribute YouTube videos, and while Roskomnadzor has identified and attempted to block only a small portion of these, they have simultaneously disrupted other services. Sophisticated TSPU devices can analyze various parts of the data packets sent and received by users.