Russia Begins Nationwide Throttling of Telegram to Push Users Toward State-Backed ‘Max’ App

Moscow’s squeeze reprises its failed 2018 Telegram ban and echoes Iran’s 2016–18 blockade as well as the Soviet jamming of BBC and Voice of America short-wave broadcasts in the 1950s-80s—a cyclical pattern of information wall-building during military stress. Structurally, the move fits the 21st-century drift toward a ‘splinternet’ where large states—China since 2003, India intermittently since 2019, Russia since 2022—seek technological sovereignty by substituting domestically controlled super-apps (Max, WeChat) for foreign platforms. Whether effective or not, each tightening normalises deep-packet inspection and mandatory on-device apps, eroding the post-1990s ideal of a borderless web. On a century scale, such fragmentations signal a reversal of the early Internet’s unifying promise; if they harden, historians may mark 2024-2030 as the decade open networks fractured into competing techno-blocs, much as radio and telegraph systems balkanised before World War I. Yet Russia’s previous retreats—and the ubiquity of VPNs—suggest technical limits and domestic pushback could temper the blockade, making this episode another step, not the endpoint, in the long contest between state control and networked publics.