carefully! This material contains obscenities and offensive tweets. We offer it because it best illustrates the feelings of Russians towards local companies.
Since mid-April, major Russian companies have begun restricting access to their internet platforms to users with a virtual private network (VPN). This is one of the requirements of the Ministry of Digital Development, which is trying to combat unblocking methods. As a result, many people in Russia stopped opening banking apps, marketplaces, entertainment services, navigation tools, and social networks when a VPN was turned on. At the moment, there are already several dozen resources, and their list continues to grow.
Companies that refuse to comply with the new requirements of the Russian authorities may be excluded from the “white list”. RBC sources too I mentioned And about another possible punishment – deprivation of IT benefits for violators (this includes deferral from the army for employees).
Journalists and experts immediately had many questions, the most important of which was how should companies differentiate between VPN traffic and regular international traffic? General Director of VimpelCom (Beeline brand) Sergey Anokhin returns in early April maleThat this is impossible.
A special guide from the Ministry of Digital Development on how to identify means of bypassing blocking on user devices was supposed to help solve this problem. However, judging by it numerous Supports V Social networksthese recommendations do not work – not only users with a VPN are subject to restrictions, but also those who are located outside Russia. This makes users very angry.
Changes in access rules also came as a surprise to Russian tourists. They complain that they cannot, for example, buy return tickets through Russian airline websites or transfer money while abroad. A reader of Astra’s post He saidIt is not even possible to know the weather forecast, because the Gismeteo website does not open from outside the Russian Federation.
Vice President of the Association of Tour Operators of Russia Artur Muradyan in a comment to Kommersant newspaper malethat at the present time the problem cannot be described on a large scale, but the number of complaints is gradually increasing:
The problem now is not systemic. But its intensity began to increase. In popular destinations – Turkey, Thailand, Egypt, Vietnam – when connected to a Wi-Fi network, access is lost. <…> What can you recommend to Russian tourists? You have a Russian SIM card with enough traffic, for example, to purchase additional reservations or change tickets. We were promised that Max would be suitable for use everywhere, including abroad, but since April 17, the national messenger has also started blocking its platform if a VPN is detected. In fact, now there is nothing left abroad, except for ordinary mobile communications.
Also, the recommendation to use a Russian SIM card does not always work. Problems arise not only when connecting to local Wi-Fi networks, but also from the mobile Internet. Vladislava, who lives in Türkiye, told the publication that even a VPN configured for Russia is unstable.
However, it is still unclear on what principle the blocking occurs. Meduza was convinced that in most cases, Russian orders from abroad still work, regardless of the country. This is confirmed by messages on social networks. For example, users can still access Gosuslugi from Canada, USA, Estonia, Georgia And many other countries. As in Max Messenger.
Most often, the services work even if you run the VPN outside the Russian Federation, for example, for one of the European countries. At the same time, Meduza knows several cases when one user retained access, but another user could not access Russian resources, even though they were in the same city and connected to the same Internet provider. Sometimes the application may not work either, but the service website will open through the browser.
Users in Russia are also angry. They accuse Russian companies of hypocrisy and remove their orders
People in Russia are also very unhappy with the new restrictions. Due to the fact that many foreign resources are blocked in the country, they are forced to use VPN often. Because the Telegram application has been blocked for more than a month, we are forced to keep it on all the time.
To bypass the restrictions, they have to either constantly turn the VPN on and off (and doing this several dozen times a day is inconvenient), or get a second phone that does not have any way to bypass the block, exclusively for Russian applications. Also, in some VPN clients, you can configure traffic tunneling so that local services bypass the VPN. However, this option does not always work – some applications still see ways to bypass the ban.
It is easy to find on social networks many angry and often obscene posts directed at companies that have agreed to comply with the requirements of the Ministry of Digital Development.
Moreover, sometimes restrictions are placed even by those services that initially promised to run services offline.
Some users try to justify the actions of large companies by the fact that they actually have no choice: either they will comply with the requirements of the authorities, or they will lose the opportunity to completely do business in the country.
However, the company will still lose part of its profits. Users, angry at the new policy of Russian services, began deleting their apps and using alternative apps. But it is difficult to determine the extent of this phenomenon.
People are particularly angry that these same companies continue to maintain accounts on social networks, which have also been blocked in Russia. That is, it is clear that they themselves continue to use the VPN. But their clients are prohibited from doing so.
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