It seems that the deputy is not aware that the service does not show ads in Russia.
Deputy of the State Duma of the Russian Federation Alexander Khinshtein commented own statement about the slowdown in access to YouTube in Russia. According to Khinshtein, he was misunderstood and the authorities are not preparing for a complete blocking of the service.
The drop in YouTube’s speed, the deputy claims, is due to a reduction in the number of YouTube cache servers operating in Russia. There is allegedly no talk of artificially slowing down access to the service.
Alexander Khinshtein
Deputy of the State Duma of the Russian Federation
All this equipment needs to be constantly maintained and replaced, however, with the onset of the SVO and sanctions, Google stopped doing this, and also turned off some of its servers.
Naturally, quality degradation began. In 2 years, YouTube traffic has already decreased by the same 40% that I wrote about. If in 2022 there were about 700 GGC caching servers operating on telecom operator networks, then by the end of 2023, their number had decreased to 450 and continues to decrease.
According to Khinshtein, the further slowdown of YouTube’s work in Russia is due to the fact that the operators who host the service’s cache servers intend to “stop working with the company under ‘gray schemes’.”
Alexander Khinshtein
Deputy of the State Duma of the Russian Federation
(…) since Google supports sanctions and even bankrupted its Russian subsidiary, it cannot officially pay for the services of Russian data centers. I do not know the details: whether their servers are hosted in our data centers for free or the money goes through “gray” semi-criminal schemes. But in any case, it is all illegal and all participants understand this well.
Most likely, advertisers will react most sensitively to the decrease in traffic quality, and this will become a serious problem for Google.
The MP did not explain why the reduction in the number of cache servers would primarily affect users of stationary PCs. In addition, it is not entirely clear which advertisers are being discussed: YouTube has not shown ads in Russia for two years.
