VPN Providers Speak Out Against Russian Internet Censorship Law

On November 1, 2017, a new law came into effect in Russia allowing authorities to block services that help users bypass internet restrictions—such as VPNs, the Tor browser, anonymizers, and similar browser tools. The law requires these services to cooperate with Roskomnadzor (the Russian internet regulator) and block access to websites banned in Russia. While users themselves are not yet held responsible, several well-known VPN providers have already announced they will not comply with the new law. Here’s what they told Meduza about their decisions.

Ben Van Pelt, Founder of TorGuard (USA)

“The draconian anti-VPN laws in Russia and China show that the authorities in these countries simply don’t understand the principles by which people live in the new digital age. Information deserves to be free from restrictions, and there isn’t a single government in the world that can change that. The internet doesn’t accept borders or limitations for political reasons. Everyone has the right to private, uncensored internet access—regardless of their country.

We will not comply with the new Russian law. Our company does not agree with Roskomnadzor’s censorship. This law not only contradicts everything we believe in, but it also has no power in our [American] jurisdiction.

We are very proud to break this law. By doing so, we openly stand for freedom of speech and free access to the internet, not censorship. Are we really in 2017? It’s starting to feel like 1984.

If we understand the law correctly, VPN providers who refuse to cooperate with Russian authorities will now be illegal in Russia. It’s still unclear whether Russian users of such services will be held responsible. We currently have several hundred clients from Russia, and their number has been steadily growing in recent months.

As a precaution, here’s some advice for Russian users: use our VPN’s stealth mode. In this mode, VPN traffic appears as regular SSL traffic, so no provider can tell you’re using a VPN. Also, if you’re worried about privacy, don’t pay for your VPN with credit cards or bank accounts—use cryptocurrencies. And, of course, don’t use Russian email services.”

Sunday Yokubaitis, President of Golden Frog

“We are very concerned that internet censorship is tightening around the world. Of course, we’re troubled by the new anti-VPN law in Russia, which is also aimed at increasing censorship. We have never supported such measures in any country and will continue to fight against them.

We simply cannot comply with the new Russian law because we provide freedom, not censorship. Our service helps people bypass internet censorship. Our company will not participate in censoring the internet in Russia, no matter what law is passed there.

As far as we understand, our Russian users are not at risk. Accordingly, we haven’t seen any significant reaction from our clients after the law was passed—the number of our Russian users has remained the same.”

Martin Müller, CEO of PrivateVPN

“We are deeply disappointed by the effective ban on VPNs in Russia. Such measures limit democracy and people’s access to freedom, which is exactly what we strive to provide—VPN means freedom. Legally, the law doesn’t directly ban VPN use, but now it’s only allowed within a ‘legal framework.’ This means the government decides what you can and cannot access. Russian users will have to deal with content censorship.

As a company, we are required to follow Russian laws—as long as we have our own servers in Russia. If it comes to the point where we have to remove them, we will. We absolutely disagree with the VPN ban in Russia. Our advice to Russian clients is simple: use any of our foreign servers. We are a Swedish company, and if you connect to a Swedish server instead of a Russian one, your connection is legally governed by Swedish law.

We can’t say exactly how many users we have in Russia—we simply don’t keep that information, as we care about privacy.”

Vladislav Zdolnikov, Co-founder of TgVPN

“The requirements of the law are absurd. First, it’s almost impossible to reliably distinguish all Russian users from others. Therefore, it’s impossible to block resources for some users and not for others. All a VPN provider has is an email and a partial bank card number used for payment. If the user paid with bitcoin, there’s not even that. And how can you determine the country from an email? You can’t.

Even if we ask users for their country of residence when purchasing a VPN, it won’t help. We could record the country in our database, but how would we filter resources for that user? Not to mention, the privacy policies of many paid VPN services explicitly prohibit using information about the user’s IP address. So I insist that this law is practically unenforceable for international VPN services.

One of the main purposes of a public VPN service is to bypass blocks. Complying with this law would make using the service for that purpose pointless. To block resources, you’d need a solution that automatically monitors user traffic and shows a block page (or blocks access entirely). But any public paid VPN service promises in its agreement not to interfere with user traffic.

We will not comply with this law, as doing so contradicts one of TgVPN’s goals—to provide users with access to any resource they want. Our company is registered in the UK, has no connection to Russia, but we do care about the censorship situation in Russia, so we plan to fight this law legally. We plan to challenge the new powers given to Roskomnadzor after the law came into force. Unfortunately, we can’t share details yet.

We will do everything we can to keep the service available to Russian users. We started our work in the Russian market, are now expanding to other countries, and our Russian users are very important to us. We understand Roskomnadzor’s technical capabilities for blocking and know how to bypass them. We are currently developing mobile and desktop VPN apps focused on bypassing VPN blocks in Russia, with several methods built in.

Our advice to Russian users is simple—stay calm. Most likely, nothing will change overall. Use paid VPN services for fast and comfortable internet access, and Tor as a free (but slow) solution—it’s almost impossible to block. A small number of services, mainly browser plugins for accessing blocked sites, will start complying with the law. Free VPN services will likely be blocked over time and probably won’t do anything to bypass Russian blocks, since their business model doesn’t allow for extra investment to stay available.

We can’t say exactly how many Russian users we have, but we can say that right before and after the law came into effect, we saw a several-fold increase in subscriptions. So people are not abandoning VPNs—in fact, they’re using them much more. The Streisand Effect in action. It’s a shame the Russian authorities don’t understand this.”