Russia’s Weird, Bad Alternative Internet

Added: 2026-05-30

[00:00:00]Hey, so nice to meet you. We should keep in touch. Let me add you on Facebook.

[00:00:04]Sorry, V contact. No, better yet, I'll follow you on Insta. I mean, Ross Grac, you're on a cleanse. Fine. I've just got to send you this crazy video I saw on you. I I mean Rube. I'll message it to you on WhatsApp. I I mean, Telegram, I mean Max, right, Max? I love Max. It's the one to watch for HBO. No, right.

[00:00:23]It's the other one. It's the messaging app where Papa Putin can keep healthy tabs on us. Love that. I hate chatting without Papa around. What if someone implies that Ukrainians deserve to live in peace? Sorry for all the confusion.

[00:00:34]It's just that this video's editors put me in this stock image of Moscow and now my phone's on the fritz. I've been losing service and I can't seem to get through to my social media or news or human rights organization websites of choice. And then I keep running into all these Russian versions of stuff. What on earth is Rue? And why is it not RuPaul exclusive YouTube? And why do they have Mr. Beast but not half as interesting?

[00:00:53]Do I need to get a Rube? Am I allowed? I sent a carrier pigeon to my writers back in Stock Footage America asking what's up. And it turns out the Russian internet is super wonky. Yes, because of all that surveillance and censorship stuff you've probably heard about on the news, but also because, as it turns out, censoring the internet and bringing it under state control is a huge pain. And Russia's attempts to do it bit by bit over the years have resulted in a very strange, frustrating, risky user experience. Back in the when the internet was just becoming a thing, Russia was sort of slow on the uptake.

[00:01:24]For example, in 2003, a majority of Americans were online, 63%, while only 8% of Russians were. At the time, the Kremlin was focusing the lion share of their censorship and propaganda efforts on good old-fashioned TV. And the internet grew up relatively open and undisturbed. But before long, the Russian government started getting involved with the internet, including buying control over Russia's largest search engine, Yandex, in 2009, when Russian internet use was already up to 43% of the population. In the decade and a half and changed since, the Kremlin has tightened its paw around the internet. From a blacklist law after protests in 2011 and 2012 that gave them more censorship power to 2019 sovereign internet law, which allows them, among other things, to block Russians access to this or that website, to the spate of social media and news blocks and internet outages they've gotten up to since invading Ukraine in 2022. There's a difference, however, between how much the Kremlin allows itself to control and censor Russia's internet and how much they can. As it turns out, controlling the internet is hard. It's a complicated, globally interconnected system almost entirely made up of people who do not want to be told what to do.

[00:02:27]The best way is to start early, the way China did. In the '90s, they already knew they wanted to control the internet. So, they built the infrastructure to make that possible from the jump. China's so-called great firewall blocks traffic to banned websites by sending almost all inbound internet traffic through three governmentcontrolled choke points and filtering out anything that they don't like. For Russia, whose physical internet infrastructure was not created with censorship in mind, banned material is more often getting filtered out by individual internet service providers, over 3,000 of them, using a variety of different methods to block sites. Here's just one of the jankier ways Russia has tried to block web traffic. In 2021, they wanted to shut down Twitter, which I think we can all get behind, whether you support Putin or not. Anyway, the mechanism that blocked Twitter used the literal URL to do so, which worked well.

[00:03:10]The problem was that Twitter sometimes used the shortened URL t.co, co which Russia also blocked which then blocked any URL with t.co in it including reddit.com and I must assume taylor swift.com and even meat.com which by the way don't go to meat.com not for the reasons you think get your head out of the gutter but because it cycled through a bunch of suspicious URLs and crashed my writer's browser. Why would Putin block that? You can think of the difference between Chinese and Russian internet censorship like this. If you want a cube-shaped watermelon, you snap one of these cube- shaped molds around a budding watermelon and it will grow into a cube shape as it gets bigger. Try to put the cube mold on their internet in the '9s. Russia has a fully grown roundshaped watermelon sitting on their counter and wants to press it into a cube, which is hard and expensive.

[00:03:56]Currently, Russia is planning to dump 15 billion rubles, around $200 million, into more than doubling the computing power of their site blocking system by 2030. At the same time, they're trying to crack down on civilian VPN use, aiming for a 96% block rate by 2030.

[00:04:11]These are just a couple of the many measures they've taken to make using the open internet in Russia impossible, or at least slow and annoying enough that you give up. But that's only half the battle. See, the other thing that the Russian government is doing is trying to make an alternative internet, sometimes called the Runet, where everything's super chill and everyone will want to hang out instead. And as a bonus, they have full snooping and blocking privileges. It's sort of like they have the big juicy open internet watermelon on the table, but they also grew a weird dry cube one and are trying to convince everyone to eat that one instead. Is this metaphor working? Some of this alternative internet is about the big structural stuff the everyday user is unlikely to clock like making a domestic version of the global internet kind of like China's which they've been working on. But a lot of it is about trying to compel the internet using public to use Russian alternatives of popular foreign apps. Hence, banning Instagram but launching Rossgram. Banning Tik Tok but allowing a Russian version called Yappy.

[00:05:05]Or even making a version of Wikipedia that's not as mean to Big Dad Vlad. Or slowing down YouTube but paying creators $1,700 a month to put their content on RTube instead. And by the way, no, not all YouTubers got that offer. I'm still waiting. With $1,700 bucks a month, I could give my writers premium feed. The app the Russian government is most desperate to replace is this one, Telegram. If you're not familiar with Telegram, it's a messaging app like WhatsApp or iMessage that also has a Twitter-like posting function in it. And it's extremely popular in Russia, boasting a 100 million users a month in the country, even despite government blocking efforts in recent years. People use it to chat, share news, and in areas closer to the Ukrainian border, alert fellow civilians about air raids.

[00:05:47]Attempts to throttle Telegram are so unpopular in Russia that people are actually speaking out against it. Not common under Putin's leadership. To all of which, the Kremlin says, "Forget about Telegram. I have something newer, cooler, and better." This is Max. Max is an app that's kind of like Telegram, except everyone you know isn't already on there, and it uses neural nets to listen in on you and tell a government when you're being insubordinate. The Russian government is desperate for people to switch over to Max. So much so that they're pushing for it to come pre-installed on all new phones and giving it functions like ID verification, signing documents, paying bills, and helping you access government services. The trouble is that everyone knows it spies on you, so many are trying to use it as little as possible or avoid downloading it at all. This is at least the current state of Russian's sovereign internet. It's kind of a weird side internet that the Kremlin is pulling every lever of power they can to compel people to use. But without the foresight or technical capabilities of, say, China, they've got a lot of work to do before the proverbial toothpaste of the open internet is all the way back in its proverbial tube. In the meantime, if you've got a working VPN, you might be watching this video on a functional version of Western YouTube or continuing to conduct your affairs on Telegram or maybe even visiting one of the 636 Ukrainian news websites blocked in Russia. Whatever you're doing on whoever's internet, just don't go to meet.com. So annoying. And hey, if you enjoy learning about interesting stuff by listening to me ramble on about it, might I recommend learning even more interesting stuff from leading experts in AI, robotics, energy, engineering, and more? If that appeals, you should check out this video sponsor E Spectrum.

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