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> And my intuition is that Telegram is going to become banned in Russia soon

It had already happened with extreme humiliation of responsible agencies.

> as Youtube is being banned now

It's not banned, it's throttled because google kept abusing backbone networks once their CDNs had started to burn down and claiming that this is totally fine and fixable with direct BGP peerings with ISPs (yeah, right)

It works just fine on mobile internet connection where traffic shaping is an inherent feature and it only works like shit on broadband where ISPs are only capable of sending TCP RST once the queue is over the limit.

> Telegram is the last popular application where you can find the content about war, protests or elections that govt doesn't like

Clearly you are not in touch with people in Russia and have never actually seen their social media. Or just being dramatic.




Do you have any confirmation for what you are claiming? E.g. the claim that all ISPs simultaneously voluntarily decided to throttle Youtube to reduce foreign traffic? It seems to me that you either don't know the details or are simply trolling.

> It's not banned, it's throttled because google kept abusing backbone networks once their CDNs had started to burn down and claiming that this is totally fine and fixable with direct BGP peerings with ISPs (yeah, right)

> It works just fine on mobile internet connection where traffic shaping is an inherent feature and it only works like shit on broadband where ISPs are only capable of sending TCP RST once the queue is over the limit.

This is not true. The connections to googlevideo are throttled by government-operated DPI, not by ISPs. You can verify this by sending following request from a Russian residential or mobile IP address to a Russian hosting provider Selectel:

    curl --connect-to ::speedtest.selectel.ru https://manifest.googlevideo.com/100MB -k -o/dev/null  
The request above is not send to Youtube, it doesn't even leave Russia, but it will be throttled because curl uses "googlevideo.com" in SNI field in ClientHello TLS record. DPI detects the SNI and drops the packets. The download speed will be very low, in the range of kilobytes/sec. However, if you remove googlevideo.com domain from SNI and write

    curl https://speedtest.selectel.ru/100MB -k -o/dev/null  
Then the file will be downloaded at full speed, megabytes/sec. It is a request to the same host, to the same IP address, but it is not throttled anymore.

Also the information about mobile connection not being throttled is outdated and incorrect. Nowadays mobile connections are throttled as well.

The information that all ISPs voluntarily decided to throttle Youtube is implausible. Why would they throttle the speed to allow their competitors to lure away their clients?


> E.g. the claim that all ISPs simultaneously voluntarily decided to throttle Youtube to reduce foreign traffic

> The information that all ISPs voluntarily decided to throttle Youtube is implausible

> Also the information about mobile connection not being throttled

Why are you trying to build a strawman? That's not what I said. I've said "google kept abusing backbone networks" (e.g. IEXPs), which obviously means it's a matter of the Main Radiofrequency Centre, since it involves nation-wide infrastructure - not some "ISP volunteering".

And I’ve never said that “mobile connection is not being throttled”. In fact, I am stating exactly the opposite, pointing out that traffic shaping is an inherent feature for a mobile ISP. In contrast to broadband, where no one bothered with deep traffic manipulation before, so an ad-hoc throttling solution (yes, typically simply reusing existing law enforcement integrations) works like shit.

> This is not true. The connections to googlevideo are throttled by government-operated DPI, not by ISPs. You can verify this by sending following request from a Russian residential or mobile IP address to a Russian hosting provider Selectel:

One does not need a synthetic test such as yours. One can simply try playing a video from the same browser, switching connection between broadband connected Wi-Fi and a mobile hotspot and notice that broadband doesn’t seem to be working properly, but mobile actually works, even if it’s not Full HD. How come? Does your hypothesis regarding “not by ISPs, but by government-issued DPIs” explain the variance in ISPs behavior? No, it doesn’t. Just as it doesn’t explain why “blocked” YT seems to be “blocked” completely different from your typical weed growers forum. It works differently from how you imagine it.

> Why would they throttle the speed to allow their competitors to lure away their clients?

Speaking of which, apparently some broadband ISPs are now trying to implement throttling properly to give them an edge over the competition: https://www.kommersant.ru/doc/6919868




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