Russia has banned VPNs and other technology that lets in users to advantage nameless access to websites.

The new regulation (see Google Translated file), signed these days by President Vladimir Putin, goes into impact on Nov. 1 and represents another fundamental blow to an open internet as we know it. This weekend, news broke that Apple has eliminated most essential VPN apps from the App save in China to conform with rules surpassed earlier this year that require VPN apps to be explicitly licensed by using the Chinese language authorities.

In line with nation-run news employer RIA, Leonid Levin, chairman of the Duma’s committee on facts coverage and era, has said that the law isn’t always focused at “introducing new bans for regulation-abiding residents.” instead, he claims it is to prohibit get entry to to illegal content. The scope of what is considered “unlawful content” in Russia, however, has widened considerably at some point of Putin’s third time period as president, with the government exerting greater manipulate over what people get admission to or post on line. As Freedom house notes, “anti-extremism legal guidelines are extensively used as a pretext to block political content, frequently without judicial oversight.”

Russia’s tries to restriction get admission to to on line facts are concurrent with legislation which could put the privacy of users at hazard. In 2015, the government passed regulation that calls for all consumer facts from Russian citizens to be saved in Russian-primarily based servers, and closing 12 months it exceeded every other regulation that calls for telecoms and net service carriers to keep visitors information for as much as a yr, a flow that triggered VPN issuer personal internet access to .