As far as I am concerned Telegram was blocked for 1) being used by terrorists and 2) the Telegram staff refusing to turn in data to aid the investigation. This has not happened to other messengers like WhatsApp and they are not blocked. Am I wrong?
Telegram should be blocked under the Russian court order for not providing decryption keys, but that order doesn't contain ruling to block entire Amazon or Google network - only IP addresses used by Telegram. Whole networks are being blocked under the order by Prosecutor General from 2015 (yes, from 2015, and recently they started to use new order from 2018). But the problem is that Prosecutor's Office doesn't have authority to block messengers, so the order is about discovering illegal content (extremist content or appeals for organizing unapproved rally - not sure if I translated correctly) located on all of those IP addresses which obviously is a lie.
So this is dubious even under russian laws.
Why are they blocking entire networks? Well, the problem is that there are limits in ACL size so if Telegram starts using thousands of IP addresses the tables can become too big. So they chose to block entire networks instead. Also, finding out which IP addresses they are using takes time, distributing and updating blocking rules by ISP takes time (on order of hours, up to a day), so without this Telegram could change IPs faster than they are blocked.
There already are russian businesses that were using IP addresses from those networks, that are suffering damages because of blocking. They are moving to other datacenters in a rush. It is unlikely that they will try to recover damages from the government.
In the end Google and Amazon will kick out Telegram, it's probably a matter of days, so I don't understand what this fuss is about.
Telegram invented a nice trick. Durov wants to reward people hosting proxies so Google and Amazon will have to identify them and kick them out too.
> That should bother Google and Amazon, who should guarantee the connectivity of their law-abiding customers by kicking out Telegram so the IP range bans are lifted.
This might increase an influx of complaints from other governments. If they kicked out Telegram, why not kick out someone else?
Telegram knew the Russian government was trying to censor them. So they disguised their traffic as Google traffic. Now, because Telegram did this and Russia called their bluff, some Google clients who have nothing to do with Telegram can no longer reach the Russian market.
Why isn't this just as malicious as any other denial of service attack? It sucks for Telegram, but it's not reasonable or sustainable to let anyone who needs to evade censorship impersonate Google.
FB routinely complied with regime's requests, just take a look on a number of chatrooms they took down. So no wonder them not being seen as a problem.