The Kremlin’s war on streaming: How Russia is moving to block YouTube and why its efforts may bring down the entire Runet

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Why has YouTube slowed down across Russia?

There are two primary explanations on offer for YouTube’s recent poor performance in Russia — one technical, the other all too human.

According to the first, the deterioration may be linked to aging equipment that had been installed by Google locally up until 2022 in an effort to prevent the service's traffic from burdening local operators. After Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine, however, Google ceased its business operations in Russia, and Russian courts imposed fines totaling over 33.6 billion rubles (close to $370 million) over the company’s refusal to remove content related to Russian war crimes in Ukraine, the LGBTQ community, and “extremism” — the nature of which the courts have refused to define. As a result, outdated equipment is not being replaced, leading to increasingly poor video playback quality on YouTube.

The second version of events would represent yet another story of deliberate repression. The Russian authorities make no secret of the fact that they would like to punish Google for removing the YouTube channels of pro-Putin propagandists while simultaneously refusing to do the same with content “banned” by the Kremlin.

Recently, officials in Russia have increasingly experimented with packet filtering to restrict access to specific websites and applications at will, without a trial and even without announcing the restrictions. There is no legal framework in Russia governing the rules for blocking or throttling websites via deep packet inspection (DPI) tools, but this appears to be of little concern to the authorities.

For nearly a month, officials and politicians have been at odds over the issues surrounding YouTube in Russia. In mid-July, Rostelecom, Russia’s largest state-controlled digital services provider, reported that the quality of YouTube streaming for all Russians had begun to deteriorate due to equipment degradation.

Anton Gorelkin, deputy head of the State Duma's Committee on Information Policy, was of the same opinion. He claimed that the blame lies entirely with Google, which does not maintain its Russian servers. “As for YouTube, the reason for the deterioration of its speed and quality is entirely on the conscience of Google, which stopped maintaining its caching services in Russia. It is impossible to stop this process without the company's participation, but I don't see any point in accelerating it either: the more natural the flow of the Russian audience to domestic platforms, the better,” Gorelkin wrote on his Telegram channel.

However, Alexander Khinshtein, head of the same Duma committee and mouthpiece of Russia’s technological censorship movement, said that by the end of July 2024, YouTube's download speed on desktop computers would drop sharply — for political reasons. He attributed the blame for Russian action aimed at impeding YouTube’s performance to the obstinacy of the American company, making it clear that Moscow’s threats of slowdowns and shutdowns are being used as a tool to pressure the California-based firm.

“It's no coincidence that [the government] chose to bring YouTube to its senses precisely during the summer period, when the bulk of people are on vacation and use mobile devices to access the Internet. The degradation of YouTube will not affect them in any way, but the resource itself will see with its own eyes that the [Russian] state has moved from words to tangible steps,” he said in late July.

The following day, the MP appeared to backtrack, once again shifting blame for the potential YouTube slowdowns onto Google — but this time, the blame was placed on technical factors. Khinshtein stated, “Russian data centers working with Google plan to end their cooperation in the coming days using ‘shady schemes' [...]. This will lead to a significant drop in YouTube upload speeds (up to 70%), which I predicted yesterday [July 25, 2024 — The Insider]. Data center administrators wisely decided that August would be the best time to minimize the impact on our citizens. The actions of these data centers will primarily affect desktop computer traffic,” Khinshtein wrote on Telegram.

He also attempted to reassure Russians, stating that those watching “artistic or educational content” would still have access to videos, though they may take longer to load.

On August 3, the state-run TASS news agency reported that YouTube had stopped playing videos in high quality across most browsers in Russia. An anonymous source in the telecom industry told independent Russian publication Meduza that major telecom operators in Russia were informed in early August that YouTube's video playback speed had been reduced to 128 kilobits per second. However, most users have yet to notice this change. Google, meanwhile, told the daily newspaper Kommersant that the issues with YouTube in Russia cannot be related to the company’s equipment or its obsolescence.

Despite the discussions of slowdowns and outages, up until the second week of August, YouTube traffic in Russia not only did not decline — it grew.

YouTube traffic generally mirrors the overall internet traffic in Russia, which saw a slight seasonal decline in the summer but shows year-on-year growth:

How YouTube caught up with TV

YouTube is watched every day by four out of five Russians over the age of 12, making it the the most popular social media platform in the country. The service's daily audience is 82.6 million people, up by one million from last year, and it is steadily approaching the 89 million who watch TV.

Television, for its part, is rapidly becoming less popular — since 2017, the most popular Russian TV programs have seen a 40% decline in viewership. The top news and political shows now attract around 5 million viewers, a number comparable to the audience of the most popular political videos on YouTube channels like those of Maxim Kats, Ilya Varlamov, Anton Hardin, and “Vot Tak,” to name but a few. These channels’ videos gain an average of one million views, while popular videos manage to reach about 5 million views or more — just like on television. Except that there are far more socio-political YouTube channels than TV channels, suggesting that the total audience for this type of content is likely much larger online than that on TV.

The most popular videos in the political segment over the past year include investigative reports on topics like Ramzan Kadyrov's harem (the independent outlet Proekt, which released the investigation, saw it gain over 10 million views), how Vladimir Putin actually started the invasion of Ukraine (this video, also released by Proekt, had hit 6.5 million total views eight months after being published), and several news clips about the terrorist attack on Moscow’s Crocus City Hall.

Pro-Kremlin YouTube channels, in contrast, struggle to gain similar traction. The most popular pro-government YouTube channel, run by the Komsomolskaya Pravda tabloid, has far fewer views, and many of its most popular videos involve non-political content. Even prominent propagandists like pro-war news anchor Vladimir Solovyov and RT editor-in-chief Margarita Simonyan failed to attract large audiences before their channels were banned.

Political content on YouTube (as on television), however, takes up only a small portion of the overall traffic. The most popular videos in the Russian segment are aimed at children: one is “eggs on a farm” teaching colors (over 5 billion views) and the cartoon “Masha and the Bear” (which has 4.5 billion views). This means that the main victims of the YouTube ban will likely be parents who need to distract their children, as well as fans of music videos and stand-up comedy.

The authorities don't seem to be too worried about them, especially since a significant part of this audience can simply migrate to the government-aligned VK, run by Vladimir Kiriyenko — the son of Sergey Kirienko, Vladimir Putin’s first deputy chief of staff. However, the real concern lies in the possibility that blocking YouTube could severely slow down the entire Russian internet.

Networks collapsing

Internet speeds in Russia have shown an upward trend over the years. According to Ookla, a company that ranks both mobile and broadband internet speeds around the world, median connection speeds in Russia have increased by 41% for home internet and 44.5% for mobile since late 2021. However, Russia still ranks only 86th globally in median mobile internet speed and 60th in broadband speed.

Despite these gains, internet speeds in many regions are stagnant or even declining. This slowdown is partly due to the increasing difficulty for operators to update their equipment and the near halt in the installation of new base stations. While the revenues of major internet providers are rising, this growth is primarily driven by reduced investment in network development — and by price increases. The implementation of the “Yarovaya Package” — a set of counter-terrorism laws enacted in 2016 and 2018 that require telecom operators to store recordings of phone conversations, text messages, and users' internet traffic up to 6 months also costs providers 50 billion rubles annually.

Experts warn that blocking YouTube could exacerbate the situation in the industry. In Russia, as elsewhere, the most popular YouTube videos in the region are cached on Google Global Cache (GGC) servers. This setup allows providers to deliver videos to users directly from servers installed in Russia.

This system saves telecom operators a lot of resources — otherwise YouTube traffic would take up most of their bandwidth. Roskomnadzor has repeatedly opposed having Google servers installed at telecom operators, but they nevertheless continued to be installed until 2022. A user on the IT blog platform Habr estimated that there are over 1,100 of these servers currently in Russia, though their condition remains uncertain.

Mikhail Klimarev, director of the Society for the Protection of the Internet («Общество защиты интернета»), recently surveyed Russian telecom operators, who reported that 25% to 45% of their traffic comes from YouTube, with three-quarters of this traffic sourced from GGC servers. If users switch to VPNs to access YouTube, all this traffic will become “foreign” from the operators’ standpoint, dramatically increasing the load on backbone networks. Klimarev warns that this could lead to slower and more expensive internet connections.

“Typically, server equipment failures involve power and cooling units or hard disks, both of which can be replaced. [Internet operators say that] they sometimes even repair these [cache servers] themselves,” Klimarev notes.

Moreover, the GGC servers are aging, and the Russian authorities are now trying to use this as an excuse for YouTube’s deteriorating performance. Even without a YouTube shutdown, the streaming workload would eventually fall on Russian operators. In 2023, as reported by ComNews, Google offered a solution: instead of relying on cache servers, operators could establish a direct peering either in Moscow or St. Petersburg to maintain quality access to Google services.

While a number of backbone operators, including Rostelecom, have begun implementing this solution, some telecom experts believe it will mainly benefit users in central Russia, with content playback quality likely to decline for those in other regions.

Moreover, according to Klimarev, while Google's imported servers are of high quality, many were installed several years ago, meaning their service life is already nearing its end.

And other threats to the Russian Internet may be approaching from a different angle. On August 7, Computerra reported that Valery Talyarovsky, the bankruptcy trustee for Google LLC in Russia (ООО «Гугл»), suggested that caching servers might be seized as part of Google's debt settlement to its Russian subsidiary in an ongoing bankruptcy case. A year ago, telecom operators and State Duma MPs debated the possibility of seizing these servers — according to ComNews, the operators were able to convince the politicians not to take this action as part of the proceedings against the American company.

Instead, Roskomnadzor might attempt to use these servers for more effective blocking. On August 8, the Russian newspaper Kommersant reported that the state communications watchdog Roskomnadzor requested telecom operators to hand over Google's caching servers’ subnet IP addresses, along with other data on them. With this data, Roskomnadzor could block traffic from these servers in Russia, potentially preventing even those videos that currently play in normal quality from being accessed.

VPNs remain key — and scammers rear their ugly head

Since YouTube is being slowed down through so-called “technical means of countering threats” (TSPU), as detailed by The Insider in October 2023, methods of blocking, and consequently ways to bypass them, are often not obvious, even to seasoned anti-censorship experts. The primary tool for users to combat Roskomnadzor’s efforts in Russia are Virtual Private Networks (VPNs) — particularly those equipped with advanced censorship circumvention features.

It has become evident that when Roskomnadzor employs TSPU to block websites, their specialists focus on several factors. First, they target the protocols used to transmit data, which is how they have successfully blocked access to services like Telegram and certain VPNs like OpenVPN and WireGuard.

Second, they block specific IP addresses that users attempt to access. This is how blocking worked even before the TSPU, when Roskomnadzor simply sent service providers the IP addresses and domains which users were banned from accessing. Now, Roskomnadzor employees have the ability to independently add IP addresses to internet filters at any time and in any combination, with no transparency or oversight regarding the criteria for these decisions. For instance, on August 7, Roskomnadzor began intermittently blocking certain IP addresses used for content distribution, rendering some bypass tools ineffective.

Google uses thousands of IP addresses to distribute YouTube videos, and while Roskomnadzor has identified and attempted to block only a small portion of these, they have simultaneously disrupted other services. Sophisticated TSPU devices can analyze various parts of the data packets sent and received by users.

Most traffic today is encrypted, and not even an internet service provider (ISP) — or Roskomnadzor, or a random hacker that accessed your Wi-Fi — can learn all that much about what sites you visit. However, one unencrypted component, called Server Name Indication (SNI), tells the server which site a user wants to connect to — and that message is tracked by Russia’s censors, who, noticing that the user wants to connect to YouTube, cut traffic speeds to the point where videos won't play.

VPNs and other specialized anti-censorship tools can bypass some of these restrictions.

As in any crisis, scammers have begun to take advantage of the YouTube shutdown. Many people searching online for “YouTube accelerators” in Russia have encountered fake websites promoting apps that claim to speed up service but actually steal data and install viruses.

For example, GoodbyeDPI, a Windows-based tool previously known only to dedicated anti-censorship users, became so popular in August 2024 — it was the top repository on the online software development platform GitHub as of last week — that scammers began creating counterfeit versions filled with viruses.