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Thu, 04 Apr 2019
Russia Expands Site Blocking To VPNs
Furnished content.
Over the last few years, Russia has been one of the most aggressive countries in using claims of copyright infringement to push for full site blocking at the ISP level. Of course, that has resulted in tens of thousands of innocent sites getting blocked (collateral damage!), not to mention a corruption scandal and... no meaningful decrease in piracy. Apparently, the answer for the Russians: head deeper into the infrastructure to push site blocking even further.Now, apparently, beyond just demanding ISPs engage in massive site blocking, various VPNs have been ordered to start blocking full sites as well.During the past few days, telecoms watch Roscomnadzor says it sent compliance notifications to 10 major VPN services with servers inside Russia - NordVPN, ExpressVPN, TorGuard, IPVanish, VPN Unlimited, VyprVPN, Kaspersky Secure Connection, HideMyAss!, Hola VPN, and OpenVPN.The government agency is demanding that the affected services begin interfacing with the FGIS database, blocking the sites listed within. Several other local companies - search giant Yandex, Sputnik, Mail.ru, and Rambler - are already connected to the database and filtering as required. You can understand how this came about: as site blocking gets more popular, more people sign up for VPNs that allow them to get around local censorship and access content as before. However, it appears the Russians are trying to stop that as well. While not quite as bad as when China started banning VPNs completely, this still represents quite a threat to securely surfing the internet.I was actually in Moscow a few years ago, very briefly, to speak on a panel, and I came armed with three separate VPN services to (hopefully?) stay safe and be able to tunnel out of the Russian internet. That was well before the big crackdown, however, and it must be more and more difficult to use the internet safely there. We've also discussed Russia's supposed plans to test disconnecting from the internet -- and it might not need to do much if it continues to reach deeper and deeper into the internet ecosystem to make it harder and harder to use the internet safely and securely.And, of course, as Professor Annemarie Bridy notes, none of this is really about copyright infringement. This is entirely about authoritarian control of the internet and censorship:Indeed, remember a few years back when the Russian government used questionable claims of copyright infringement to intimidate government critics? The US's infatuation with copyright has handed a tool of out and out censorship to authoritarian leaders, who can censor freely while insisting they're doing so to help American copyright corporate interests.
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posted at: 12:00am on 04-Apr-2019
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