Now, it has also been reported that Russia’s state telecommunications regulator has announced that is has asked both Google and Apple to remove Telegram messenger service from their app stores.
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Now, Telegram is officially banned in Russian Federation, and it looks like the government is doing what it can to enforce that ban.
But as users flocked to virtual private networks and proxy services to reach Telegram from their mobile devices and computers-or resorted to building their own-government censors added large swaths of IP addresses to the block list. APK Mirror, which mirrors free Android app APKs from many developers, was told to block access to Telegram APKs in Russian Federation.
“In recent years the Russian authorities have steadily targeted the country’s few remaining spaces for freedom of expression”.
“We have now informed both companies that a significant number of IP addresses located in the clouds of these two services have fallen under the block on the basis of the court ruling (to block Telegram)”, Zharov was quoted as saying.
Earlier, Pavel Durov said that the Russian market is important to the Telegram development team for personal reasons.
Andrei Soldatov, the co-author of The Red Web, an authoritative account of internet surveillance in Russian Federation, said the campaign showed a no-holds-barred approach unconcerned with political fallout.
Some eight million of the IP addresses are said to belong to Amazon cloud servers. “Once you cross the line, you can do anything”.
A clumsy attempt by the Russian authorities to block Telegram has taken many unrelated websites and apps offline – while so far the instant messaging service has continued operating.
Ultimately, no matter what the Russian government does it will not be too complicated for Russian citizens to download and use Telegram.
“We appealed the immediate action taken on the decision to block Telegram in the Moscow City Court”, Chikov said in his Telegram channel.
The whole mess has attracted a chorus of voices expressing support for Telegram, including American expatriate Edward Snowden, who calls Russia’s move “a morally and technically ignorant censorship effort”.
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Even if Russia’s scorched Earth approach succeeds in blocking access to Telegram, users could just fire up VPNs to connect. Many have not complied, and the law has not been widely enforced.
