President Vladimir Putin is studying YouTube’s slowness and outages in Russia after the country’s top film official raised the issue with him, the Kremlin reported on Friday.
Critics believe authorities are deliberately disrupting YouTube to prevent Russians from viewing a large amount of content critical of Putin and his government. Russia denies this, claiming that the problems are due to Google not updating its equipment, an accusation refuted by the company and technology experts.
Russian Internet monitoring services have reported massive outages in recent months to the online video hosting service owned by Alphabet’s Google. But communications regulator Roskomnadzor said Friday it has seen no change in service quality.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said the speed problem is related with Google’s failure to comply with Russian legislation and that technical issues should be addressed to Roskomnadzor. Google did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
According to research company Mediascope, more than 50 million Russians use YouTube daily. It constitutes an important platform for the Russian opposition in exile and for independent media.
Peskov stated that the speed of YouTube is not one of the priorities of the Russian population, but Karen Shakhnazarov, who has run the state-run Soviet and Russian film giant Mosfilm for more than 25 years, He said Thursday that he met with Putin and addressed the matter with him.
“Stopping YouTube, in my opinion, is not very advisable nowadays,” Shakhnazarov said on state television. “The president responded that there are all kinds of disgusting things there.”
Shakhnazarov said he agrees that there is some bad content on YouTube, but he stated that those who want to access them are able to circumvent the restrictions and many others only want to watch movies and other content.. “He listened to me and told me: ‘I’ll study it,'” he said.
