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YouTube speed drop caused by cessation of 'grey scheme' operations — senior lawmaker

Alexander Khinshteyn underscored that these measures are connected to the company’s own actions

MOSCOW, July 26. /TASS/. The upcoming reduction of YouTube loading speed is connected to the fact that Russian data centers that cooperate with Google via so-called ‘grey schemes,’ intend to stop this work, says Alexander Khinshteyn, Chairman of the Russian State Duma Committee on information policy.

On Thursday, Khinshteyn announced that YouTube’s loading speed on desktops will drop by 40% by the end of this week, and up to 70% by the end of next week. According to the lawmaker, this measure will not affect mobile apps.

"According to my information, Russian data centers that cooperate with Google, intend to stop working via ‘grey schemes’ with this company (regardless of who impersonates it). This will cause an even sharper drop in the YouTube loading speed (up to 70%), which I predicted yesterday," Khinshteyn said on his Telegram channel.

He underscored that these measures are connected to the company’s own actions.

"The company has never built any data storage centers in Russia, and has never invested in the Russian infrastructure," he said, adding that most of the video content is being stored on communications providers’ infrastructure and in a number of major data centers. "All this hardware must be maintained and replaced constantly, but, since the beginning of the special military operation, Google stopped doing it, and even shut down some of its own servers,"the lawmaker said.

Because of that, the hardware has started degrading, and Google "started offering telecom operators to connect to Russian data centers directly."

"This made it possible to stop the decrease of the traffic quality, but only temporarily. Because another problem arose: since Google supports the sanctions and even bankrupted its Russian subsidiary, it is unable to officially pay for the services of Russian data centers," Khinshteyn added.

He underscored that the website "will remain available for Russian users," but content loading will take more time.

"Most likely, advertisers will react the worst to the reduction of traffic speed, and this will actually become a serious problem for Google," the lawmaker said.

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Top stories from the Russian press on Friday, November 22nd

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