Roskomnadzor may restrict the work of GoDaddy and Amazon Web Services in the Russian Federation

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In total, there are eight foreign hosting providers on the list of candidates for blocking due to refusal to register in the register of the supervisory agency. Experts warn that this could lead to disruptions in the operation of many mobile applications and websites.

Photo: collage “Roskomsvoboda” / Canva AI

Roskomnadzor may restrict access to the Russian Federation for eight foreign hosting providers because they did not comply with the department’s requirements, Russian media report, citing the department’s press service.

According to RKN, Law No. 406-FZ was previously adopted, according to which special requirements were established for companies providing hosting services, including filing an application for inclusion in the register of hosting providers. However, several foreign companies did not comply with these requirements, while continuing to provide hosting services for Russian organizations, including GoDaddy, Kamatera, Network Solutions, Ionos, HostGator, DigitalOcean, Amazon Web Services and Hetzner Online GmbH.

The legislation also obliges companies that provide hosting services to ensure the security of information in their infrastructure and to interact with the Center for Monitoring and Management of the Public Communications Network (MCN SSOP) to counter DDoS attacks, the agency recalls.

“Taking into account the risks to which the resources hosted at the facilities of these companies are exposed, the work of these hosting providers may be limited in the territory of the Russian Federation - in this case, they will not be able to provide hosting services to Russian organizations,” the department said .

The RKN also recommended hosting sites at the facilities of organizations that conscientiously comply with Russian laws and are included in the register of hosting providers. Otherwise, organizations that host their resources on the facilities of foreign hosting providers may face a number of serious threats, the department explained.

After Roskomnadzor began adding companies providing such services to its list, Roskomsvoboda launched public monitoring of this register and now it already includes 428 hosting providers .

Regarding the possible restrictions on the work of popular companies, we turned to experts for comments, asking them to explain what this could mean.

“This may threaten that many mobile applications and sites will stop working,” says one of the IT specialists at Roskomsvoboda.

The expert also explains:

“They promise to block entire hosting platforms, where people host websites and application servers. To check whether a particular site or server will work, you need to look to see if their servers are located on these hosting sites. If the ban really starts to take effect, some sites and applications will move, change hosting if they want to remain accessible to Russians, and some will ignore and simply not work in Russia. We are witnessing a new stage of Russian online censorship - blocking by entire hosting sites. There have already been something similar in small things, but this is the “biggest thing.”

At the same time, another Roskomsvoboda technical specialist believes that there is too little input data about the intentions of the supervisory agency, so it is impossible to accurately predict all possible consequences. At the same time, he recalled:

“The last time they tried to limit the work of Amazon, half of the Internet went down, and a bunch of IoT resources [ ed. - Internet of things]. But I would hope that those responsible realized and corrected their architectures. Although, most likely, nothing has changed in practice, and the repeated bombing of the Amazon will put everything to rest again. But, again, these are just assumptions. In fact, anything can happen: from the fact that only some services will be affected (perhaps even unknown to anyone), to the fact that again “Alice Maroussia” will fly off.”

“This is the ‘Turkmen option’, with a total blocking of everything,” well-known IT expert Ilya Vaitsman told Roskomsvoboda in a commentary to Roskomsvoboda.

In his Telegram channel, he called RKN’s intentions a “serious problem”, because on these sites “not only sites of almost everything run, but also a noticeable part of VPN services”:

“Of course, there are hundreds of other sites in the world, not so noticeable, where there are also VPN nodes, but in general the situation is deteriorating sharply. Translated as “to touch,” this means stopping work with most of the keys obtained from open sources.

It is not yet clear what to do with this, because it is not known what locking mechanism will be used. Let's think."

“As a first approximation, we can assume that we will have to build chains of services. Of course, even if successful, everything will work worse and slower,” the expert concluded.

The article will be updated as comments are received.