Russian Plans To Block Major VPNs as an attempt to close up Internet

Russia is coming more closer to implementing the kind of internet regulations that exist under the Great Firewall of China.

Russia internet providers has earlier this year began preparing to conduct a tests to find out if the country can build an internet that stands out and disconnected from the rest of the world. As a result, Russia plans to block major virtual private network(VPN) services which allow users to reach banned websites.

Two months ago, Russia’s telecommunications regulations agency Roscomnadzor send a message to the top VPN providers instructing them to link their servers to the government-run IT system, which is use to prevent people in the country from accessing banned sites.

Roskomnadzor told the ten providers which includes; ExpressVPN, HideMyAss! , IPVanish, Kaspersky Secure Connection, Hola VPN, KeepSolid, NordVPN, OpenVPN, and VyprVPN— that they VPN providers have 30 days to respond.

According to Reuters report that If they however fail to act in accordance,
Roskomnadzor may decide to restrict access to their VPN service.

TorrentFreak reports shows that since the notice was sent out, NordVPN explained has failed to comply because the said act would violate customer service agreements. The likes of IPVanish, VPN Unlimited, VyprVPN, and OpenVPN has also failed to comply to the censorship efforts.

In one of his speech, Roscomnadzor chief Alexander Zharov told Russian outlet Interfax on Thursday that only Kaspersky comply by connecting to the state IT server.

"All the others did not answer, moreover, they wrote on their websites that they would not comply with Russian law and the law says unequivocally if the company refuses to comply with the law—it should be blocked." - Zharov said

He further said that Roscomnadzor plans to block the other VPN services within a month.

And if it happen as said, this would mean that the non-complying VPN services would be put on Russia’s blacklist, so local ISPs would have to block consumers from the services, but we are still not clear if this would affect the VPN’s servers or their web presences.

These ten VPNs do not exhaust the entire list of proxy programs available to our citizens so if they are block i don’t think there will be a tragedy since there are other IP service providers in the country.