Russian Censor Gets Help From Amazon and Google

Google and Amazon have failed the test of whether they’d sacrifice their commercial interests in Russia (and other authoritarian regimes) to some higher principle. As the messenger Telegram tried to use the companies’ cloud services to dodge a Russian ban, the two U.S.-based giants ended so-called domain fronting, the practice on which Telegram was relying.

Telegram, which had 15 million users in Russia (out of about 200 million overall), was banned by a Moscow court last month after Russia’s domestic intelligence, the FSB, demanded its encryption keys, ostensibly so it could get access to suspected terrorists’ messages. Pavel Durov, who founded Telegram with his brother Nikolai, a wizard developer, was adamant that the FSB wouldn’t get its wish. As Roskomnadzor, the Russian internet censorship body, told providers to block access to internet addresses normally used by the messenger, it began jumping between IP addresses owned by Amazon’s and Google’s cloud businesses. As Roskomnadzor moved to block entire subnetworks (blocks of IP addresses) to stop this, hundreds of businesses — including, at one point, Google Search — became temporarily unavailable to Russian internet users. Runet, as the country’s internet segment is known, was suddenly broken — but Telegram kept working without a proxy.