Lock in silence

For almost a week, Roskomnadzor has blocked vast ranges of IPv4 Internet service addresses at its discretion. At some point 0.5% of the total volume of addresses was blocked. A bit earlier, both ways to circumvent locks , comments from affected businessmen , and legal aspects have already been considered. Unfortunately, none of the large companies of the “Runet” has spoken about this.

Why is it important?

Ubiquitous technologies depend on the resources that are in the lock.

For example, Yandex’s browser ( second or third place in popularity in Russia ) uses Google technology and is unlikely to be able to abandon them or completely rewrite the browser code in order not to depend on “several Google IP addresses”.

Modern web development involves the use of various collectors for creating websites and one-page web applications. One of the most popular collectors of this kind is webpack, the testing process of which is tied to launching Travis virtual machines from blocked cloud providers. Is Avito and others willing to give up the Webpack?

Large companies with a large staff of qualified specialists are silent about incompetent blocking.

Recently, only comments of small companies and individuals who were directly affected by the blocking are visible. For large companies, the cost of losses from commenting on the actions of the regulator may be too high, since it already affects not technological, but political aspects.

Such locks violate the performance of computer equipment.

September 29, 2016 Roskomnadzor entered the HTTPS site certificate checking service (OCSP) and Digicert certificate revocation list (CRL) into the banned site registry. This has caused various problems for browser users on all platforms. The address was removed from the registry only on October 10, that is, for more than ten days, any operations related to access to sites via a secure protocol were carried out with a delay of 3–10 seconds.

In the Safari browser on macOS and iOS, this generally made it impossible to display sites on HTTPS.

Given the problem centers issuing certificates Startcom and WoSign, HTTPS reliability in Russia has been compromised.

Have telecom operators reacted? I could not find confirmation of this.

Have security companies responded? No

The release of a similar product day-to-day blocking competitor.

Messenger TamTam, advertising which appeared on the day of blocking a competitor, looks ugly and sends a signal "we will not be blocked." Based on the competence of the regulator and the previous history of resource locks, this signal cannot be trusted.

These companies have a voice that, unfortunately, ordinary users lack.

In 2013, Law No. 292521-6 was passed, which was vigorously debated on the Internet party, including representatives of major players.

After its adoption, an initiative was created to cancel it at http://www.roi.ru . Despite receiving more than 100 thousand votes, it was ignored.

I will not now evaluate the laws and this one in particular, but look at the social responsibility of business. Based on the definition, large companies with a large audience could describe the consequences of adopting certain laws for society. Some companies write articles in their corporate blog. A banner on the main pages of large Internet resources could change the situation radically. Then it would not be necessary to write about the need to "add a little common sense to the regulatory mechanism." Look at this huge red cross:

For example, in the US, providers have lobbied for changes that relate to traffic prioritization and speed limits for conventional resources. A large number of companies that are aware of the social significance of such changes in the legislation informed their users in one form or another about future changes. Internet giants Amazon and Google also did not inform their users, but, due to the less monopolized English-language Internet services, the message was perceived by a wide audience. Discussion of these changes has been going on for many years and a legislative basis will be created for some time.

Thanks to users

In my opinion, all of the above points testify to the tacit support of locks by the largest players of the “RuNet”. If a company cannot exist without the Internet, it makes a profit on the Internet, but it cannot perform the social function of notifying the maximum number of users that the Internet can stop working, then you should not use the services and products of such a company.

In simple terms, I and other Internet users in Russia in recent days have spent several million people-hours searching for access to Google services, while large companies have not been able to spend several man-days to inform their audiences.

How could we - as users - thank them for such an attitude?