Roskomnadzor brings the legal framework for mass blocking of IP addresses

Currently, all IP addresses are blocked on very dubious grounds, some experts believe

Roskomnadzor intends to make adjustments to the existing procedure for entering the list of prohibited IP address resources that are used to bypass the locks. Adraft order “On Approving the Procedure for Identifying Information Resources in order to Take Measures to Limit Access to Information Resources” has been published on the government portal Regulation.gov.ru.

According to the draft, another reason will be added to the document for entering an information resource in the register of prohibited resources: these are “court decisions and decisions on administrative offenses that have entered into legal force” .

ByAccording to experts , in this way, Roskomnadzor is trying to legalize the actions that it has been carrying out since April 16, 2018, by blocking millions of IP addresses for the task - the degradation of the Telegram messenger in the Russian Federation. Over the first week of blocking, the share of the active Telegram audience in Russia decreased by 3 percentage points .

As you know, now Roskomnadzor enters into the registry entire subnets of cloud services and hosting. Currently, the providers for unloading 17965850 IP-addresses. These are the subnets of Google, Amazon, Microsoft, DigitalOcean, CloudWebManage, UK2, Hosting Services Inc., Cloud Services DC05, OVH SAS, Online.net, Clouding.io, Hetzner and others. There are several Telegram Messenger Network IP addresses.

Roskomnadzor bans entire ranges where proxies and VPNs are detected. According to rumors , thanks to the help of the Mail.ru Group cloud service, even those proxies that never really missed users ’traffic and didn’t show themselves at all were blocked (Mail.ru Group saidthat has already blocked a client who was scanning proxies for Telegram from the IP address 128.140.175.98 in the Mail.ru cloud).

Regarding Google, the regulator has been particularly brutal in recent days. Not only cloud hosting subnets are blocked, but also specific IP addresses of various service sites. However, this morning Roskomnadzor backtracked and unblocked 79 Google IP-addresses . However, now in unloading are:

• 48 google.com IP addresses out of 1033
• 1 IP address www.googletagmanager.com of 227
• 1 IP address fonts.googleapis.com of 244
• 1 IP address www.youtube.com out of 626
• 33 IP addresses play.google.com of 435
• 33 IP addresses drive.google.com of 395
• 34 docs.google.com IP addresses of 308
• 1 IP address of google.ru from 291
• 34 IP-addresses of site s.ytimg.com of 317

You can check the availability of IP addresses and subnets of specific companies using the telegram bots rknbot , RKN block check and RKN IP blocking check .

Experts have previously noted that the mass blocking of IP addresses is very doubtful from a legal point of view. The court ruled to block only IP addresses belonging to Telegram. That is, Roskomnadzor should identify them one at a time, send a notification for each, wait for an answer, add to the lists. The lists themselves are updated with a delay of several hours and are limited in size. If Roskomnadzor acts according to the law, then Telegram can go away from blocking for years with minimal costs.

Therefore, the regulator had to use the decision of the Prosecutor General's Office as a basis for blocking. It allows you to immediately block many IP addresses, but only for several reasons, including the detection of extremism or calls for inconsistent rallies. That is, now all these millions of addresses are blocked due to the fact that there the Prosecutor General's Office allegedly discovered these same calls. Locks on entire subnets are most likely used to avoid wasting time finding addresses one at a time.

These are the notifications received by the hosters from Roskomnadzor in the early days of the blockade .



According to the new Blocking Procedure, which Roskomnadzor hoped to quietly hold, mass blocking is included in the legal field.

“After a series of blocking subnets, many industry lawyers drew attention to the fact that there is no legal basis for such actions by Roskomnadzor,” explains Irina Levova, director of strategic projects at the Internet Research Institute. “Probably, the supervisory authority realized that the blocking of all IP addresses takes place on very dubious grounds, and decided to quickly and non-publicly eliminate this gap and thus bring the legal framework under their actions.”

PS According to rumors , Oleg Anatolyevich Ivanov is personally responsible for blocking Telegram in ILV, and two engineers are directly engaged in blocking around the clock (their names are not yet reported), who have been allocated a separate room and equipped with the necessary equipment, including 4 USB modems for connecting to different operators. According to an anonymous source, the engineers were not allowed to leave the premises at the weekend and were not allowed to sleep - this explains the “inadequate” blocking of the / 32 subnets included in / 22, which we observed on Sunday.

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