Russia Blocks FaceTime Nationwide, Reveals Earlier Snapchat Ban

States have choked communications before—Tsarist Russia seized control of telegraph offices during the 1905 Revolution, and China’s Great Firewall (formalised 2003) still blocks Facebook and YouTube—but Moscow’s 2022-25 squeeze is the first large-scale clampdown inside a G20 economy already at war and under sanctions. The move deepens the post-Ukraine trend toward a ‘splinternet’: nations building sovereign tech stacks (Russia’s “MAX”, China’s WeChat, India’s data-localisation push) and ejecting foreign encrypted services they cannot surveil. Over a century, today’s step matters less for FaceTime’s market share than for the precedent: if major powers can excise secure protocols at will, the open, global internet envisioned in the 1990s may resemble the fragmented, state-run radio networks of the 1930s—functional domestically, but balkanised internationally.