Rostelecom proposed to deny access to Google and Cloudflare DNS servers, which are used by the Navalny application

Rostelecom proposed to ban the use of public DNS servers of Google, Cloudflare and DoH service. This will restrict access to prohibited resources. Corresponding letter published Telegram channel “ZaTelecom”, its authenticity confirmed RBC is a representative of Rostelecom.

Instead of Google and Cloudflare servers, Rostelecom wants to use its DNS servers or the IP addresses of the National Domain Name System.

A representative of the press service of Rostelecom, answering a question from RBC about the reasons for the initiative, said that “we are talking about technological work aimed at improving the reliability and optimization of communication networks.”

DNS is a distributed system for obtaining information about domains. Most commonly used to obtain an IP address from a hostname (computer or device).

In particular, the DNS services of Google and CloudFlare are used for the operation of the Navalny application, which has a Smart Voting page.

Thus, Rostelecom can transfer its clients to use other servers in advance in case of blocking public DNS servers.

On September 3, Roskomnadzor blocked six VPN services, including NordVPN and ExpressVPN. After that, the World of Tanks and World of WarShips games, the Twitch and FlashScore streaming services, the Avito announcement site, and the BitTorrent torrent client crashed.

Earlier, Roskomnadzor said that in September it will begin testing blocking of some foreign Internet encryption protocols that hide the name of the site. This was reported by Kommersant. Services that support foreign encryption protocols include Google’s DNS servers, Cloudflare, and the DoH service implemented by Mozilla and Google.

According to the publication, earlier state-owned companies received a letter with a request to check whether they are using encryption protocols that hide the name of the site. They were also asked to connect to the DNS services of Russian telecom operators or to the National Domain Name System by September 9th.

According to Alexei Navalny’s associates and IT specialists, Roskomnadzor tested mass blocking of websites on 9 September. A colleague of Alexei Navalny, Ivan Zhdanov, wrote about this on Twitter. In his opinion, this is due to attempts to block the operation of the Navalny application with the Smart Voting function. After blocking these services, Zhdanov writes, many Russians may be left without Internet access.

“This literally means that they are ready to put half of the Internet down at once,” wrote an associate of Navalny.