Russian providers are “warned” against arbitrary YouTube speedups

Telecom operators have started receiving warnings from authorities for speeding up YouTube on their own. In Russia, YouTube has been slowing down since mid-summer 2024, but without an official reason. Providers have started to circumvent the new rules, including to avoid losing subscribers – they have started to terminate contracts and switch to mobile Internet, where YouTube is still working at an acceptable speed. The first warnings began to arrive just a day after it became known that YouTube was being accelerated.

Initiative punishable

Russian providers have started receiving warnings against speeding up YouTube. One of these documents, marked with the details of the Main Radio Frequency Center (GRChTs) subordinate to Roskomnadzor, was received by the provider Transtelecom. Khabr drew attention to this.

YouTube has been slowing down in Russia since mid-July 2024, but this mostly concerns home and office Internet – on mobile Internet, the service’s speed is still acceptable. Russians have begun to break contracts with wired Internet providers, not wanting to suffer and looking for ways to bypass the slowdown.

The letter does not directly mention YouTube. But it came immediately after providers began to independently combat the slowdown of the service – literally within a few hours after information about it appeared on the Internet.

Let us recall that at the end of August 2024, providers, guided by the fact that YouTube is not yet blocked in Russia, and the fact that the official reason for its slowdown by the authorities is not disclosed, began to implement solutions into their infrastructure that allow forcibly speeding up the service.

Just a day after this information appeared on the Internet, providers began receiving warnings from regulators.

What is required from providers

The document, which the unnamed Transtelecom employee is talking about, states that telecom operators need to “take measures to eliminate the use of technologies for distortion, fragmentation, and substitution of Internet traffic on technical means of communication networks,” ensuring the ability to immediately restrict access to information or information resources on the Internet, access to which “is subject to restriction in accordance with the legislation of the Russian Federation.”

The authors of the notification also ask to provide information on the measures taken, and to do so no later than September 2, 2024.

How exactly providers speed up YouTube was not known for sure at the time of publication. There is information that some of them redirect traffic from Russian Google caching servers to European ones, but there is no official confirmation of this yet.

A YouTube phenomenon

YouTube’s slowdown has become a resonant event. This web resource, which has existed since 2005, has accumulated the world’s largest database of videos on a wide variety of topics. No other video service in the world can offer such diversity.

Russians most often use YouTube for learning – the portal contains billions of instructions on any topic, from making lemon pie to fixing a very rare laptop model. It also contains a lot of children’s content, and searching YouTube is often the fastest way to find the right cartoon and turn it on for your child. There are also a lot of entertainment programs from all over the world on YouTube.

There are several video platforms in Russia that position themselves as alternatives to YouTube. One of them, RuTube, appeared in 2006, that is, just a year after the launch of YouTube. In the spring of 2021, the platform underwent another redesign, becoming an almost complete copy of YouTube in terms of appearance.

Russians immediately responded to YouTube’s slowdown by starting to look for (and find) ways to force it to speed up. YouTube is not yet on Roskomnadzor’s “black list”, it is not blocked, but only slowed down. To remedy this situation, Russians, among other things, are buying up customizable routers, the firmware of which can be modified to neutralize the effect of the slowdown.