Russia Begins Phased Throttling of Telegram to Push Users Toward State-Backed ‘MAX’ App

States have long tried to choke channels they cannot read—from the Tsarist ban on the revolutionary press in 1905 to the USSR’s jamming of Voice of America (1949-1988) and China’s Great Firewall rollout from 2003. Russia’s 2026 throttling revives that lineage yet differs: it targets a home-grown platform central to both regime propaganda and battlefield command. The move crystallises two intertwined 21st-century trends: (1) the global fracture of the internet into sovereign “splinternets,” and (2) governments’ shift from blunt bans to ‘managed degradation’ that nudges users toward compliant domestic super-apps (here, VK’s MAX, legally pre-installed on every device). Whether this matters in a century hinges on technology’s cat-and-mouse cycle: encryption, satellites, and VPNs historically outpace censorship, but AI-driven Deep Packet Inspection could tilt the game. If Russia succeeds where its 2018 Telegram ban failed, it would signal that autocracies can now weaponise advanced traffic-analysis to re-nationalise the net; if it fails, it reenacts Iran’s 2016-present stalemate and underscores the resilience of distributed communication. Either outcome will inform how future states—from democracies fearing disinformation to dictatorships fearing dissent—engineer the next stage of digital sovereignty.