Russian President Vladimir Putin, in talks with Chinese President Xi Jinping, agreed to help tighten internet censorship, the pro-Kremlin Oktagon newspaper reported , citing sources familiar with the situation.

 

China proposes plan to block YouTube to Putin

By The Moscow Times Russian Service 
moscowtimes.ru
2 min
March 29, 2023

Russian President Vladimir Putin, in talks with Chinese President Xi Jinping, agreed to help tighten internet censorship, the pro-Kremlin Oktagon newspaper reported , citing sources familiar with the situation.

According to them, a group of Chinese cyberthreat experts arrived in Moscow, who, together with Russian colleagues, will analyze and prepare a technical roadmap for a complete blocking of YouTube in Russia.

Part of the technology, according to Octagon, will be provided by the People's Liberation Army of the People's Republic of China, and the rest will be based on their own Russian and Belarusian developments.

According to the schedule, the blocking of YouTube, one of the largest platforms for the anti-war agenda, will become possible in the fourth quarter of 2023. The pilot project can be implemented by Rostelecom, and if successful, by all other providers, Oktagon writes.

Following Western social networks and foreign media sites, VKontakte is already preparing to block video hosting, sources in the telecommunications market told Forbes .

According to them, the company began to install servers on provider networks to speed up the download of video content. This is necessary, because if YouTube is blocked, VK will have a large-scale surge in traffic, explains one of the Forbes sources.

The presidential administration's political bloc, led by Sergei Kiriyenko, as well as many members of the cabinet of ministers, are in favor of preserving YouTube, according to Meduza sources close to the Presidential Administration and the Kremlin.

Their argument boils down to the fact that people who go to YouTube for political content will still get it - through a VPN.

The security forces and the first deputy head of the Presidential Administration, the curator of the Kremlin's information block, Alexei Gromov, demand to close the video service. At the same time, there has been more and more talk about blocking lately, Meduza’s sources say.

“The chances of closure are high,” one of them explains: if before the authorities considered video hosting as a platform for state propaganda, now this argument does not work - pro-government media channels are being closed one after another.

The final decision will have to be made by President Vladimir Putin, who previously called the Internet an invention of Western intelligence agencies and proposed developing a separate, closed "intranet" for Russia.

“The president of YouTube himself definitely does not use and has a poor idea of ​​​​how it works. And the lockdown is in the logic of further escalation [with the West],” a Meduza source says.

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