Russia to Block 9 VPNs for Rejecting Censorship Demand

Russia plans to block nine VPN providers for declining to hook up their servers to a government content-filtering system.

The blocking will occur within the next month, according to Russia's telecommunications regulator Roskomnadzor. "The law says unequivocally if the company refuses to comply with the law—it should be blocked. So, we will do it in some time," Roskomnadzor's head Alexander Zharov told Interfax on Thursday.

The blocking is part of a Kremlin attempt to rein in VPNs, which can circumvent the country's online censorship. In 2017, the country passed a law requiring VPN providers to register with Roskomnadzor and block access to websites the government has banned.

Now Russian authorities are attempting to enforce the law. In March, Roskomnadzor sent notices to 10 VPN providers demanding they register with the regulator and hand over access to their servers or face a ban. Only one VPN provider, Moscow-based Kaspersky Lab, complied.

Many of the remaining VPN providers, including ExpressVPN, TorGuard, and NordVPN, have publicly opposed Roskomnadzor's censorship request. At least some have also been shutting down their servers in Russia in the event local authorities try to seize them.

"The option to connect to Russia through the app has already been removed," NordVPN said in a March blog post. "We understand that this may inconvenience some users, but these changes are necessary to keep our service secure."

VPN provider Hide My Ass!, on the other hand, pulled out of Russia entirely. "It's a necessary concession," the company said in a blog post. "We're a member of the Avast family (surprise!) which means that if we stuck to our guns with this it would compromise the mothership's ability to provide free antivirus protection to the Russian people."

Many of the other affected providers plan to keep serving customers within Russia. But the blocking from Roskomnadzor will probably make it harder for Russian customers to look up and subscribe to the banned VPN providers. (The upcoming ban will also target VPN Unlimited, VyprVPN, OpenVPN, Hola VPN, and IPVanish.)

Nevertheless, the VPN market is full of other competing players. Time will tell if Russia will threaten to block those as well.

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Disclosure: PCMag's parent company Ziff Davis is owned by j2 Global, which also owns various software products and services including Encrypt.me, IPVanish, and StrongVPN.

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