Russian watchdog obliges VPN services to block certain sites

Russian telecom watchdog Roskomnadzor has ordered ten VPN services to comply with a law that went into effect two years ago. This obliges internet services to connect to a database of the watchdog in order to block certain sites.

If that does not happen within a month, Roskomnadzor will limit access to those VPN services, the watchdog writes. The telecom authority has submitted the compelling request to NordVPN, Hide My Ass!, Hola VPN, Openvpn, VyprVPN, ExpressVPN, TorGuard, IPVanish, Kaspersky Secure Connection and VPN Unlimited. Other VPN services would already meet the requirement to connect to the authority’s database, FGIS.

The banned sites database contains a list of domains and IP addresses to which the Russian government wants to restrict access. In the past, there were also well-known sites in the west such as LinkedIn and Wikipedia, but it also concerns local sites.

The VPN services have one month to respond. It is unknown whether they will comply with the request, but that is not obvious. Many vpn services pride themselves on the feature that people in countries with Internet filtered customers can visit all sites on the Internet.