The occupiers decided to “cut down the branch” on which the lion’s share of the digital infrastructure of the modern world rests.
Militants of the DPR group began to block Google services in the territory controlled by them in the Donetsk region. The Russian publication “Vidomosti” writes about it.
According to unnamed employees of local providers, back in October of last year, DPR militants sent letters to local operators with a demand to block Google services, the Viber messenger, and the Zoom video conferencing service, as well as to slow down YouTube traffic.
It is not clear why this requirement has been implemented only now. Interlocutors of the publication report that the blocking has already caused disruptions in the work of Google-related third-party services. For example, problems began with smartphones based on the Android OS developed by Google.
“Google has a large range of IP addresses, and the company randomly uses them in various services, so they periodically fall off,” – explained one of the interlocutors.
Censorship in the Russian Federation and the occupied territories
The Russian state continues to restrict citizens’ access to any information that does not fit into official propaganda narratives. For example, at the end of January in Russia, access to the sites of the CIA and the FBI was blocked – allegedly for spreading “fakes” about the Russian army.
Most often, Russian censorship looks frankly ridiculous. After the leak of Yandex’s internal data, it became known that the Russian search engine blocks the publication of photos and videos of Putin for offensive search queries.
Some types of censorship in the Russian Federation are simply absurd. For example, in Yakutia, they tried to prosecute a journalist for the word “front” said in the context of the war in Ukraine.
