The Russian VPN market may face harsh restrictions: industry participants expect a large-scale purge of servers on the infrastructure of domestic hosting providers. Sources in the industry told this to "Kod Durova".
Amid these expectations, some services have begun actively promoting long-term subscriptions. However, according to one owner of a VPN platform, this may be an attempt to collect money before a possible block, and users risk simply losing access along with their payment.
Experts consider the common argument about the "imminent shutdown of payment gateways" to be exaggerated. Large processing systems like Yookassa stopped working with VPN services long ago, and the market has already adapted — payments are disguised as other services.
The key threat now is not payment, but infrastructure. Amendments to the "Antifraud 2.0" bill may require hosting providers and data centers to identify and disconnect in advance the servers through which access to blocked resources can be obtained.
According to sources, the practice itself is not new, but now it may be applied much more harshly. In that case, server shutdowns will become the main tool for restricting VPN operations.
If these measures prove insufficient, regulators have other means of pressure as well — up to and including blocking individual protocols.
Against the backdrop of such risks, experts advise against buying subscriptions years in advance: in the event of mass shutdowns, services may stop working immediately, and the money will not be refunded.
Read more on the topic:
