It’s now been about two weeks since Roskomnadzor has started (trying to) block the Telegram messaging app within Russia.

Let’s review what has been achieved:

1. 15-20 million IPs have been continuously blocked since mid-April, affecting cloud servers used by legitimate enterprises and news sites within Russia.

2. Meanwhile, Telegram itself hasn’t been blocked.

3. Knowledge of VPN has spread from online gamblers and political freaks who read marginal liberal and nationalist webzines to normies.

4. Meanwhile, a whole bunch of aforementioned “extremist” sites have been getting accidentally unblocked (you can test availability with this tool).

5. Large parts of the Russian bureaucratic apparatus and state-owned corporations have simply ignored all this and continued using Telegram.

6. They have now pretty much single-handedly kickstarted the 2018 protest season, with around 12,000 protesters turning up on a working day and on very short notice to an Internet freedom rally organized by the Libertarian Party (!).

Also a reminder that Roskomnadzor gets more than 10% of the funding accruing to the institution producing ~40% of Russian high quality research

Budget of Roskomnadzor – 8.5 billion rubles (2017)

Budget of Russian Academy of Sciences – 74 billion rubles (2017)

Note that these are just the facts. They should not be interpreted as attacking or denigrating the feelings of Roskomnadzor believers.