Russia’s War on Telegram Threatens to Reach Amazon and Google

Russia’s attempts to ban access to the Telegram messaging service threaten to drag U.S. tech giants including Alphabet and Amazon into the war.

Telegram Messaging App — Photographer: Carl Court/Getty Images

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By Ilya Khrennikov

April 18, 2018 at 11:57 AM UTC

This article is for subscribers only.

Russia’s attempts to ban access to the Telegram messaging service threaten to drag U.S. tech giants including Alphabet Inc. and Amazon.com Inc. into the war with founder Pavel Durov as he turns to proxy servers to bypass the blocking measures.

Russian communications regulator Roskomnadzor has already blocked 18 Google and Amazon sub-networks that Telegram used to avoid restrictions, the watchdog’s head Alexander Zharov told the Izvestia daily on Wednesday. More than 15 million IP addresses were blocked as a result, making some third-party internet resources unavailable in Russia, according to Qrator Labs.