Only VPN helps.
Last week, the State Duma announced that YouTube would be slowed down first by 40%, and then by 70%. This is allegedly due to the lack of equipment updates for Google’s caching servers located in Russia for two and a half years, while the Russian audience was constantly growing and, as a result, the load on the remaining servers and other network equipment.
Naturally, this is only part of the truth. The second part is the systematic violation of Google and YouTube’s rules of presence on the Russian market, unilateral and extremely one-sided decisions to block Russian users, remove Russian media channels, silence “pro-Russian” opinions regarding the current geopolitical crisis, the outcome of which is now largely (if not entirely) being decided in Ukraine, as well as zero feedback from the Russian government. Simply put, content that is banned in Russia is not removed from YouTube, and everything that Google is required to consider “Russian disinformation” is removed without trial or investigation.
Actually, the slowdown of YouTube in Russia, where almost every Internet user watches various videos at least once a month (the video hosting audience in the Russian Federation is approximately 100 million people), is intended to somehow bring the service’s administration to its senses. In practice, since about yesterday evening, the slowdown of YouTube has been not 70%, but all 100%. If the service’s pages load, then the videos themselves do not play even when the quality is switched to the lowest possible.
We don’t know how reasonable this decision is, because so far the problems from these “showdowns” are experienced only by users who don’t give a damn about politics and the Ukrainian crisis in particular. The point is that YouTube, like Google in general, has been operating at a loss in Russia for 2.5 years already, just to somehow stay on the market: it is prohibited by the collective West from concluding contracts with advertisers from the Russian Federation, and from updating server equipment (the West will consider this an export of technology). In fact, Google suffers only losses from the Russian market that has fallen away, and it is very strange under such conditions to “educate” the service by threatening to lose its audience.
The Internet is already full of instructions on how to restore YouTube’s functionality, but their effectiveness is highly questionable. So far, the only guaranteed way to restore access to YouTube is through a VPN. Considering that Roskomnadzor actively monitors any information about bypassing blockages and prohibits popular VPN services, we assume that soon Russia will see a boom in renting virtual servers located in, say, Germany, on which their own private VPN servers will be “raised”.
