In Moscow, Center "E" officers detained activist Maxim Kondrakov, who was planning to hold a rally against the blocking of YouTube. Kondrakov himself told OVD-Info about this.
The activist has now been released; no report of any violation was drawn up against him.
At the beginning of the month, the young man submitted an application to the authorities to approve a rally against the blocking of YouTube: the event with up to 30 thousand people was planned to be held on August 17. However, on August 8, the authorities did not approve the action, citing Covid restrictions. In the response letter, the applicant was also warned that "if the said event is held, the organizers and participants may be held liable."
After receiving a refusal, Kondrakov received a call from an employee of the Center "E", who said that he wanted to "talk". Today, security forces arrived at the young man's house and detained him on the street, taking him to the OMVD "Tsaritsyno". He was later released with a warning about the inadmissibility of illegal actions.
- It is known that protests against the blocking of YouTube were also planned to be held in Chelyabinsk and Kazan . As in Moscow, the authorities of both cities refused to hold them.
- On July 12, Rostelecom Corporation reported a slowdown in YouTube, citing technical problems with Google equipment. A Meduza source suggested that the real cause could have been a hidden slowdown of the service initiated by the authorities. State Duma deputy Alexander Khinshtein subsequently confirmed this version, stating that this was being done to “bring YouTube’s administration to its senses.” In August, users again had problems accessing the service.
- Traffic slowdown is a technology that appeared in the arsenal of Russian authorities after the adoption of the “law on the sovereign internet” in 2019, which obliged providers to install state equipment for traffic analysis and filtering (DPI). In March 2021, RKN began slowing down the social network Twitter, while some RuNet users reported problems accessing other sites, including state ones.