Russia, Tlc giant Rostelecom calls for Google and Cloudflare to be blocked

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September 14, 2021Rostelecom - the Russian telecommunications giant and Russia's leading digital service provider - has asked its macro regional branches to ban access to Google's DNS servers and Cloudflare, as well as the DoH encryption protocol.

These are services that allow you to bypass blocks to sites or apps that are banned in Russia, such as that of the opponent Alexei Navalny. The request letter was published on the Telegram ZaTelecom channel and its authenticity was confirmed to the Russian media by a representative of Rostelecom. The body justified the request with the need to "organize stable internet access for users".

Previously, Roskomnadzor - the Russian telecommunications authority - had asked Google, Apple, Cloudflare and Cisco not to provide Navalny's sites and apps with the means to circumvent the block, adding that failure to meet the requirements would be considered. as "a foreign interference in the electoral campaign" in the Duma, he had warned the body and on 8 September he had blocked Google Cloudflare's DNS services for a few hours.

DNS is a domain name system that converts the literal address of a page on the Internet into the IP address of a specific device or server. The DoH protocol is implemented on the public DNS servers Google and Cloudflare, which allows you to encrypt web traffic so that operators do not see which resource the user is accessing who, among other things, manages to reach prohibited sites in the country. .

Already in 2018, the Russian parliament approved a law that

, with fines of up to 700 thousand rubles (10 thousand euros) for search engines that provide links to blocked sites. Since then, VPNs and Anonymizers have also been banned, which, according to the law, must connect to the Russian federal computer system and block access to banned sites on Russian territory.