Roskomnadzor, the Russian Internet and telecom authority, announced today that it is lifting restrictions on access to Telegram.
The regulator cited “Telegram’s readiness to combat terrorism and extremism” and referred to an agreement with the federal prosecutors.
Earlier this month, as reported by Meduza, Telegram’s founder Pavel Durov urged the authorities to unblock Telegram and let its “30 million users in Russia to use the service more comfortably.”
Telegram was banned in Russia on April 13, 2018, following its refusal to let the Russian secret service FSB to decipher user messengers as required by law. However, the instant messenger never stopped being widely accessible from Russia.
Why telegram was blocked
Adopted in 2016, a Russian legislation (dubbed ‘Yarovaya law’ or ‘Big Brother law’) requires messenger apps and other “organizers of information distribution” to add additional coding to transmitted electronic messages so that the the FSB can decipher them.
Telegram agreed to register its service in Russia, but refused to cooperate with the secret service under “laws incompatible with Telegram’s privacy policy.”
As a consequence, a Moscow court ruled to block access to Telegram in a trial which Durov called “an open farce.”
The authorities’ failed attempts to block access to the service in 2018 caused substantial damages to a number of online services which saw their IP address blocked even though they had no relation to Telegram.
