The Russian Federal Service for Supervision of Communications (Roskomnadzor) has closed 2 million IP addresses. 800 thousand of them use Amazon hosting. The rest are accounted for by Google. The ban is related to Telegram’s attempt to use the capabilities of Amazon and Google to bypass its own blocking in Russia, which began on the part of Internet operators on April 16. The actions of Roskomnadzor have already affected Russian gaming companies.
Officially, the blocking of 800 thousand Amazon IP addresses has only been confirmed so far. As Alexander Zharov, the head of Roskomnadzor, told RT, “We have received an Amazon subnet for unloading [banned sites], which Telegram switched to.”
Zharov explains this by the decision of the Tagansky Court, which on April 13 decided (at the request of Roskomnadzor itself) to block the operation of Telegram on the territory of the Russian Federation.
Alexander notes that the court ordered Roskomnadzor “and other legal entities not to create conditions for technical access to the blocked messenger.”
According to the court‘s decision, which I have read App2Top.ru at the moment, Roskomnadzor really has very wide opportunities to block the service. Judge Yulia Smolina , among other things , ordered:
“Oblige the Federal Service for Supervision in the Field of Communications to stop creating technical conditions for processing electronic messages of Internet users distributed through information systems and programs for electronic computers, the functioning of which is provided by Telegram, including by restricting access to these information systems.”
In theory, the matter may not be limited to 2 million IP addresses. But they were enough for Russian gaming companies to face problems.
Photo: A. L.How did the blocking of IP addresses affect the participants of the Russian gaming market?
In particular, on his Facebook page Dmitry Terekhin, the founder of Nekki, known for the Shadow Fight series, noted that his projects were affected by the blocking.
Also in conversation with App2Top.ru other teams also reported problems.
The head of the Elysium VR project, Alexander Pashin, noted that two projects that he advises “fell under the distribution.” At the moment they are “moving” [to other hosting sites].
Andre Freidman, CEO of Lotos gaming, a game development company, said that two test servers had fallen.
Not everything is in order with the RBK Games gaming platform. According to its general director Vasily Ryabov, “Roskomnadzor, without understanding, simply banned the entire subnet in which we were.” At the moment, some of the players from Russia cannot get on the court. RBK Games offers them to use a VPN to play.
Players in foreign projects also have problems. As he writes DTF.ru , On the evening of the 16th, many players from Russia faced a problem with entering Guild Wars 2. It is not yet known whether this is precisely due to the activity of Roskomnadzor, but users associate the inability to play with this.
The most common problem associated with the actions of Russian services was noted by Stas Pleshchev, director of the Payat10ntion marketing agency. According to him, it took the team a day to rebuild communication processes: “We had all communications in Telegram. There are a lot of partners in Ukraine, Moldova and Kazakhstan. So the whole day was spent dragging them to Skype. They don’t want to, they’re uncomfortable. That’s the day we spent — about 15 channels were dragged. History, of course, is gone, but this is the biggest loss so far.”
Also on the topic:
- Roskomnadzor plans to block access to Amazon Web Services in RussiaIn Russia, a law is being prepared to regulate video games
- Mizulina promised to bring the issue of age marking of games to public discussion
- Sources: Roem, RT, Meduza, DTF
Jenner VandenHoek