Roskomnadzor brings a legal basis for massive blocking of IP addresses

At the moment, blocking all IP addresses occurs on very dubious grounds, some experts say

Roskomnadzor intends to make adjustments to the existing procedure for entering into the registry of prohibited resources of IP addresses that are used to bypass locks. On the government portal, Regulation.gov.ru, a draft order “On approval of the procedure for identifying information resources in order to take measures to restrict access to information resources” has been published.

According to the draft, the document will add another reason for entering an information resource in the register of prohibited resources: these are “judicial decisions and decisions on cases of administrative offenses that have entered into legal force” .
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According to experts , in this way Roskomnadzor is trying to legalize the actions that it has been carrying out since April 16, 2018, blocking millions of IP addresses for the purpose of the task - degradation of the Telegram messenger on the territory of the Russian Federation. During the first week of blocking, the share of Telegram's active audience in Russia decreased by 3 percentage points .

As you know, now Roskomnadzor makes the entire cloud services and hosting subnets in the registry. Currently, there are 17 965 850 IP addresses in the download for providers. These are subnets of Google, Amazon, Microsoft, DigitalOcean, CloudWebManage, UK2, Hosting Services Inc., Cloud Services DC05, OVH SAS, Online.net, Clouding.io, Hetzner and others. There are several IP addresses for the Telegram Messenger Network.

Roskomnadzor bans entire ranges where proxies and VPNs are detected. According to rumors , thanks to the help of the Mail.ru Group cloud service, even those proxies that never really allowed users to pass traffic and didn’t show themselves were blocked (Mail.ru Group stated that it had already blocked a certain client who was scanning the proxy for Telegram with IP -address 128.140.175.98 in the Mail.ru cloud).

Regarding Google, the regulator has acted especially brutally in recent days. Not only cloud hosting subnets are blocked, but also specific IP addresses of various service sites. True, this morning Roskomnadzor backed out and unblocked 79 IP addresses of Google . However, now in unloading are:

• 48 IP addresses of google.com from 1033
• 1 IP address www.googletagmanager.com of 227
• 1 IP address of 244 fonts.googleapis.com
• 1 IP address www.youtube.com of 626
• 33 IP-addresses play.google.com from 435
• 33 IP addresses of drive.google.com of 395
• 34 IP addresses of docs.google.com from 308
• 1 IP address of google.com from 291
• 34 IP-address of s.ytimg.com from 317

You can check the availability of IP addresses and subnets of specific companies using telegram bots rknbot , RKN block check and RKN IP blocking check .

Experts and earlier paid attention that mass blocking of IP addresses is rather doubtful from the legal point of view. The court ruled to block only IP-addresses belonging to Telegram. That is, Roskomnadzor must identify them one at a time, send a notification to each, wait for an answer, and add to the lists. The lists themselves are updated with a delay of several hours and are limited in size. If Roskomnadzor will act according to the law, then Telegram with minimal costs can go away from blocking for years.

Therefore, the regulator had to use the decision of the Prosecutor General’s Office as a basis for blocking. It allows you to immediately block many IP addresses, but only for several reasons, including the detection of extremism or calls for uncoordinated rallies. That is, now all these millions of addresses are being blocked due to the fact that the Prosecutor General’s Office there allegedly discovered these very appeals. Blocking with whole subnets is most likely used so as not to waste time finding addresses one by one.

Here such notifications came to hosters from Roskomnadzor in the first days of the blockade .



According to the new Order of blocking, which Roskomnadzor hoped to imperceptibly carry out, mass blockages are included in the legal field.

“After a series of subnetting locks, many industry lawyers paid attention to the fact that there is no legal basis for such actions by Roskomnadzor,” explains Irina Levova, director for strategic projects at the Internet Research Institute. “Probably, the supervisory authority realized that blocking all IP addresses occurs on rather dubious grounds, and decided to quickly and privately eliminate this gap and thus put the legal framework under their actions.”

PS According to rumors , Oleg Anatolyevich Ivanov is personally responsible for blocking Telegram in the RKN, and two engineers are engaged in blocking around the clock (their names are not reported yet), which have been allocated a separate room and equipped with necessary equipment, including 4 USB modems for connections to different operators. According to an anonymous source, engineers were not allowed out of the room on the weekends and were not allowed to sleep - this explains the “inadequate” blocking of the / 32 subnets in / 22 that we observed on Sunday.

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