Russia Begins Nationwide Throttling of Telegram to Funnel Users to State-Run ‘Max’ App

Kremlin technocrats are replaying their aborted 2018 Telegram ban and, more pointedly, Beijing’s 2013–15 phasing-out of foreign messengers in favor of WeChat; both episodes show how states first tolerate, then co-opt, and finally supplant private platforms once dependence is entrenched. The latest squeeze slots into a two-decade global drift toward “digital sovereignty”: Russia’s 2019 sovereign-Runet law, India’s 2021 intermediary rules, and the EU’s 2024 DSA all signal that governments—authoritarian and democratic—now assert territorial control over code and data. Whether the tactic works matters because communication networks, like 19th-century telegraphs or 20th-century short-wave radio, shape political power for generations: if citizens accept a surveillance-ready super-app today, the architecture of the Russian internet could resemble China’s walled garden for the rest of the century; if they keep circumventing with VPNs, the attempt may join the Soviet jamming of the BBC (1949-88) as a costly, ultimately porous exercise in information control.