Column by Yuri Litvinenko on the difficulties of tracking blocking in Russia

The blocking of Wikipedia in Russia almost from the beginning of hostilities in Ukraine is perceived as a quite probable event, primarily because of the numerous claims of Roskomnadzor. Perhaps it was this expectation that prompted GlobalCheck observers, who noted the unavailability of the encyclopedia over the weekend, to immediately announce the worst. Meanwhile, the Wikimedia Foundation itself almost immediately reported problems with access to some encyclopedias, and users of the Downdetector service outside the Russian Federation noted failures. The reason, as it turned out later, was a DDoS attack on the Wikimedia server.

Popular services for monitoring the availability of Internet resources can be divided into two categories: those that come from monitoring user complaints (for example, Downdetector or Crash Detector), and those whose robots in different countries “ring out” the connection (GlobalCheck or NetBlocks). All of them note only the consequences of violations, but are not able to reliably determine the cause. But it can consist not only in the actions of the body responsible for blocking, but also in failures on the side of the site itself or at the provider used by the end user.

So, for example, it was in January, when the App Store was unavailable for a number of providers in Russia. The problem, which was solved within an hour, could be instantly bypassed by using third-party DNS servers (they match site domains with the IP addresses of the servers on which they are located) instead of those provided by the default provider.

Sometimes the quality of observation of blockages is affected by banal forgetfulness. Because of this, in June, some linked the blocking of Google News, which happened back in March 2022, with the rebellion of Yevgeny Prigozhin. Meanwhile, the address of the main page of “Google News” is still not in the register of Roskomnadzor.

But the times when the fact of blocking in the Russian Federation could be unequivocally established according to data from the regulator’s website are long gone. The ability to block using TSPU (technical means of countering threats; installed on the networks of providers under the law on the “sovereign runet”) has lowered the degree of filtering transparency. The quality of data in the registry sent to providers has also deteriorated: many sites are now blocked by an unnamed body, and references to the Prosecutor General’s Office have disappeared from the upload fields.

Finally, over large sites, including Wikipedia, the sword of Damocles hangs in the form of “coercive measures” announced by Roskomnadzor: now they are limited to notes in Yandex, but according to the law they can go as far as restricting access. So the accusations against the department in case of any failures are, in principle, not surprising. But by no means always justified.