“Russians rushed to download free VPN and Rutube app amid slowing YouTube”-The Moscow Times
Man. I guess the VPN Companies were getting a sudden spike to their sales.
Imagine western governments secretly funded companies that provide free VPN in Russia. The damage to the russian state would probably be massive.
I have 5 of them downloaded rn, gotta go download more
I thought VPNs were illegal in orcland.
"A free VPN has become the most popular app in Russia amid a slowdown in the American video hosting YouTube. The program allows you to fix the problem and watch videos in the usual quality. The second and third places in terms of the number of downloads in the App Store and Google Play stores were Rutube and VK Video, Meduza noted.
According to the data .ai service studied by the publication, for the last two months, VK Video has occupied a maximum of 23rd place in the top of the App Store. The application was in the top three at the end of July after a sharp drop in the speed of uploading videos to YouTube in Russia. About the same thing happened with the demand for the Rutube application.
Meanwhile, the Russian state news agency TASS reported that VK Video topped the lists of the most downloaded apps in Russia in the Google Play and App Stores, hiding the fact that the first line of the top is occupied by VPN. RIA Novosti did the same, noting that VK Video and Rutube overtook YouTube in popularity in the free applications section.
VK reported that the number of downloads of their service for watching videos increased 4.5 times after the slowdown of the American video hosting. Gazprom-Media, which owns Rutube, did not comment on the situation.
Earlier, Meduza’s source in the telecommunications market said that the Russian authorities notified the largest telecom operators about slowing down the speed of video playback on YouTube to 128 kilobits per second. This is only enough to listen to audio or watch videos in a resolution not higher than 240p. Slowdown is carried out through technical means of countering threats (TSPU) - specialized equipment installed on the networks of telecom operators and controlled by Roskomnadzor.
According to the source, the authorities will not completely turn off the American platform yet, counting on the fact that the Russians themselves will stop using it. "If they want YouTube to just open and hurt, then that’s the perfect scenario. Again, we can say: “We did not block, it somehow continues to work,” he explained.
Earlier, the head of the State Duma Committee on Information Policy, Alexander Khinshtein, announced a decrease in the download speed of YouTube in Russia to 70% in early August. He called the “degradation” of access to video hosting “a forced step directed against the administration of a foreign resource.” Subsequently, the American platform really stopped play videos in high quality in most browsers in Russia, installed on desktop computers and laptops.
Roskomnadzor claimed that the fault was the wear and tear of Google’s local equipment, which the corporation did not update after leaving the country due to the war in Ukraine. However, Google denied this - when using a VPN, there are no problems with downloading videos in Russia. The average daily reach of YouTube in the country is 55.4 million people."-The Moscow Times
How would it do any damage? Russians are eating up propaganda already and once they flip to a Chinese style intranet, they won’t be able to use VPNs at all anymore.
Just info about them being censored basically VPN usage is not illegal if I remember correctly