Russia to restrict use of another 6 VPN services - Roskomnadzor

MOSCOW. Dec 2 (Interfax) - The Federal Service for Supervision of Communications, Information Technology and Mass Media (Roskomnadzor) is planning to restrict the use of another six VPN services and therefore notifies companies using them in their operations.

"As required by response regulations, please be informed about the pending centralized control of means used to bypass restrictions on access to information prohibited by law," Roskomnadzor said.

The service has asked enterprises and entities to notify the Center for Monitoring and Management of Public Communication Networks (TsMU) about using VPN services (Betternet, Lantern, X-VPN, Cloudflare WARP, Tachyon VPN and PrivateTunnel) in their operations.

The information may be sent to sc@rkn.gov.ru and shall contain the name of entity and use details, the regulator said.

The use of over a dozen of popular VPN services, such as ExpressVPN, Nord VPN, Hola!VPN, IPVanish VPN, KeepSolid VPN Unlimited and Speedify VPN, was limited in Russia earlier.

Roskomnadzor allows the use of such services only to companies from the so-called white list that inform the regulator they need the services for work. The list may be expanded.

As reported earlier, Opera disabled VPN on its browsers in the Russian territory in response to restrictions on its VPN service in Russia.

Roskomnadzor demanded on March 27, 2019, that owners of ten VPN services connect to the federal state information system containing a register of information prohibited in Russia for traffic filtering purposes, but only Kaspersky Lab's VPN service did so.

The amendments to the laws On Communications and On Information, also known as the law on sustainable/sovereign Runet, took effect on November 1, 2019, to envisage the creation of independent infrastructure in Russia that would provide web routing in the event of impossibility to connect to foreign root servers. Should a threat to Internet service occur in the Russian territory, Roskomnadzor will be able to take centralized control of traffic via the Center for Monitoring and Management of Public Communication Networks using technical counter-threat means in operator networks and filtering traffic that passes through those networks.