YouTube will be completely blocked in Russia

Berliner Zeitung YouTube will be completely blocked in Russia Article by Katerina Alexandridi • 1 hour • 1 minute reading time A senior Russian politician confirmed that YouTube will be completely blocked in Russia. The American video portal YouTube will be completely blocked in Russia. This was announced by the deputy speaker of the State Duma, Boris Chernyshev. He clarified that this will happen as soon as the video platform owned by VKontakte, the Russian equivalent of Facebook, and Rutube, the Russian alternative to YouTube, have set up a system for monetizing content. If domestic platforms gain enough power to completely displace YouTube, sooner or later it will be shut down, Chernyshev told the news.ru portal. The Russian authorities had already started throttling YouTube's playback speed in July. At the time, President Vladimir Putin's spokesman Dmitry Peskov denied that a complete ban was planned and attributed the difficulties in accessing the portal to technical factors related to YouTube owner Google. "We know from the official statements of our respective companies that this is a problem with devices that have not been updated for more than two years. There can be no other explanation," Peskov added. YouTube blocked access to channels associated with state-funded Russian media worldwide in March 2022, after the outbreak of the war in Ukraine. In justifying this move, YouTube said that Russia's invasion of Ukraine fell under its policy on violent events and that material that violated this policy would be removed. Russia then imposed fines on Google for failing to remove content that Russia considers illegal or undesirable.