MP Alexander Khinshtein’s recent vow to slow down YouTube’s download speeds over Alphabet’s anti-Russian policy has rekindled talks of the platform’s potential ban in Russia. However, the lawmaker then U-turned and blamed the glitches on Google that had allegedly failed to upgrade its equipment in Russia, leading to a drop in download speeds that’s manageable so far. But the Russian users’ concerns are understandably stoked by the Russian government having already blocked everything from Instagram and X to much smaller grassroots political websites. However, somehow the one platforming countless independent voices whose outreach is on par with that of Russia’s MSM is still alive and kicking. Let’s try and figure out what factors deter YouTube’s trip to the graveyard. The original plan was to fork out trainloads of the government funds to hype up YouTube’s Russian counterpart. Once the government-backed platform was to win over much of the YT audience and host important public figures and celebs, the headstrong U.S. platform would’ve been shut down. The implementation and the ban rumors started back in 2021 as VK began offering lucrative contracts and pitching great prospects to YT creators willing to make the switch. Three years into the effort, VK has gobbled up eye-watering amounts of money and even shared some with the hustling switchers, but has mostly drawn a blank just like countless other government-backed “replacement products.” Those include brand-new Russian-made passenger jets, the Sputnik search engine, the Wikipedia knock-off, microchips, video game consoles, flexible tablets, Yotaphones, and suchlike. These stillborn projects get ridiculed by pros and only exist as long as the government money desperately keeps them on life support while being siphoned off in galore. There’s no such thing as user-generated VK videos. Most of its content is produced by the platform itself. Barring a couple of standup comedians, no YT creators have voluntarily switched to VK. Even the worst of the propagandists are clinging on to dear life on YT until their content is deleted for good because switching to VK means tumbling into the underworld of a million fake views for a video commented by 300 accounts. As of now, VK is headlined by Artemy Lebedev, Stas Vasilyev, and a handful of TV comedians looking for new formats and finding none. Things aren’t changing a teensy bit for VK that has turned into a government project with government-paid creators. Given the one-time popularity of the platform, VK’s current debacle can only be explained by the government overplaying its hand. Clearly, the Russian leaders are trying to model their replacement projects after the Chinese counterparts. And here’s the conundrum. On the one hand, independence, self-sufficiency, and self-reliance have become the values hallowed by the Russian officials. On the other hand, the very same officials are singing paeans to the Chinese government’s initiatives. But hard as they try, China and Russia have literally nothing in common. The Russian bureacrats are looking in awe at the self-sufficient Chinese economy, their Great Firewall, their tech market, and their heavily censored culture. Even more awe-inspiring to them is the way Western companies fall into line with the Chinese government’s ideological injunctions. Except they’re missing one “tiny” detail we’ll talk about after a brief commercial. AD Let’s keep rolling. The Russian bureacrats are looking in awe at China and seek to replicate its practices. Except they’re missing one “tiny” detail. China’s population is 10x that of Russia. One in five humans live in China. Think about it: Russia’s entire population is just a couple dozen more than that of the Guangdong province alone. China can afford to invest in the design and production of passenger jets that will only be operated by the domestic airlines. The Chinese market won’t choke at a couple hundred new aircraft. The country’s largest airlines have a fleet of over 600 jets. Each of these airlines is larger than Russia’s entire commercial aviation industry. The same goes for cars, smartphones, PCs, and other tech. In a unique fashion, the Chinese companies can afford to invest billions of dollars in R&D that's going to pay off by simply focusing on the domestic market. China’s walled-off internet infrastructure includes the Chinese-made counterparts of YT, FB, Instagram, messaging apps, search engines, and payment systems. In China, the locally run projects are vying with each other. VPay is competing with Alipay, and not with PayPal. The Great Firewall has allowed China to close in on the kind of digital sovereignty Putin’s honchos are yammering about. But this sovereignty covers one-fifth of the world population. The Chinese domestic platforms are on par with its international counterparts when it comes to audience numbers and content diversity. Typically, as the Russian government is about to dip into the state budget touting another supposedly promising project, they go, “We’ll have it the way they do in China.” But importantly, these guys have yet to succeed in doing anything but thriving off the crude oil sales. Secondly, Russia can’t be compared to China. Russia simply can’t afford its own tech market because it’s too small in terms of both its population and the size of the national economy. YOUTUBE & RUSSIANS Today, the great Russian government IT gurus triumphantly find themselves at square one. They’ve got nothing to show for their efforts. VK hasn’t blossomed into a major video sharing platform. YouTube, on the other hand, has retained its lead in the Russian online viewership. Why then wouldn’t they just block YouTube with nothing in return? It’s simple. The kind of content the Russian government crusaders deem malicious is less than 1% of the YouTube traffic in Russia. In Russia, YouTube is mostly used for leisure and entertainment as well as for education and parenting purposes. Politically themed content is massively outnumbered by everything else, including animated cartoon shows, meal recipes, home repair walkthroughs, tech reviews, video game streams, weird DIY auto repair videos, and test prep tips & tricks. In Russia, YouTube is part of most people’s daily lives. For a lot of Russians, it serves as both a streaming platform and a search engine. 15 years ago, people used to google their chocolate chip cookie recipes. Now they head straight to YouTube. Today, YouTube is by far the Russian internet’s most popular service, the GOAT of all online platforms, an absolute legend, no contest, period. Blocking this tool would mean impinging on most people’s lives in the most brutal fashion, something any autocracy dreads the most. Worse still, the intrusion this violent may eventually prove not worth the squeeze. Those who turn to YouTube for political content will continue to do so. They’ll surely find the loopholes and workarounds, just as they did with Meduza, X, and Instagram. The demographic that’s already accustomed to putting in some effort into finding the things they’re looking for will continue in the same vein and won’t be thwarted. But it’s the politically disengaged audiences that the ban will take the heaviest toll on. Those will include parents who used to play amusing animated shows for their kids ahead of their GP appointment. They’re going to be affected the most. True, Putin and his cronies are enraged by this whole YouTube thing, but the advantages of blocking it would be dwarfed by a raft of problems it would spawn. The reason they’ve been pumping fortunes into VK is to try and change this dynamic so that once the kid’s screams have exploded the decibel meter, the hapless parent is able to tap the speedy blue icon instead of the familiar, albeit glitchy, red one. But that’s not happening. Importantly, there’s also a flip side. Besides platforming a raft of independent media outlets, YouTube is still the largest artery for government propaganda. There’s a reason why the doomsday enforcers and saber-rattlers get so upset as they get kicked off YouTube. Elsewhere, they’ll be useless as no one is going to watch their rants and, crucially, no one’s going to pay for them, either. What’s the point of fanning the propaganda flames on VK? The main page features Artemy Lebedev reeling off his humdrum expletives, mediocre comedians joking about dumb girlfriends, or familiar thugs waxing poetic about the nuclear armageddon. The VK propaganda reeks of the legacy TV networks. It isn’t garnering new audiences. Rather, it’s just preaching to the choir. Those who are using VK for its content are in total agreement with the propaganda. SHOOTING THEMSELVES IN THE LEG For all of YouTube’s efforts to take down the propaganda channels, the Russian propagandists are absolutely undeterred as they gain access to those who can’t be bothered by turning on a TV set or owning one, roughly the under-40s. The older the audience, the more they watch TV and hash over the latest episodes of the propagandist shows. The younger the audience, the harder it is for the government to brainwash them using their traditional toolkit. YouTube serves this purpose just brilliantly. A new episode of Dmitry Puchkov’s show on VK won’t have any reach beyond his faithful audience. Instead, what they do is clip such videos into multiple shorts and upload them to YouTube so that a high-octane dose of moronic claptrap is just one swipe away from a refreshing cocktail recipe vid. True, the Russian platforms are government-controlled, whereas YouTube isn’t. But unlike VK, YouTube has a huge viewership. And this second consideration is far more relevant to those whose job is to brainwash the audiences with tall tales of Lenin having created Ukraine. True, YouTube is taking down openly pro-Kremlin channels, but no amount of moderation can help counter an army of demagogues spreading their propagandist tentacles in a bid to target the audience they won’t bump into anyplace else. YouTube has an unparalleled scope. None of the platforms banned by the Russian government hold a candle to it. And this makes it a difficult target. True, YouTube has been leveraged by anti-war dissidents to address millions of Russians, and severing off this channel seems a logical step to take. But the Russian government narratives are long lost on the viewers of channels similar to mine. They’re a lost cause. In the absence of YouTube, my viewers won’t be tuning in to Vladimir Solovyov’s diatribes. They’d rather turn on their VPN. We’ll keep in touch with our audience either way. The only obstacle we’ll be facing is going to be garnering new viewers. But it's manageable. On the other hand, the YouTube ban may upset those who’ve never even considered watching my videos to the point where they begin to investigate, install a VPN, or sneak a peek into my Telegram channel or my channel on the crumbling YouTube. But more importantly, it’s going to screw the propaganda crowd whose only shot at reaching the unlikely audience will be wasted for good. That’s why YouTube has been operating in Russia for 29 months too long. The Russian government is like a cat that raises its paw in the air to swoop down on its prey, only to retract it time and again. Similarly, the repeated vows to ban YouTube have been firing blanks so far. The damage inflicted by this move is clear, while the gains, if any, are highly questionable. Waxing dramatically about replacing literally everything, including YouTube, is one thing. Stripping yourselves of the access to a functional tool is a whole different ball game, though. Ominous rants make for a perfect soundtrack to carving up the federal budget, while having some real tools capable of doing real things is a must. To reiterate, unlike China, Russia simply can’t afford a walled-off internet infrastructure. There’s no Russian “counterpart” of YouTube just as there’s no alternative to the Boeing or Airbus jets. Neither the independent thinkers nor the government gaslighters and brainwashers have any alternative. But these considerations may mean nothing. Some of Russia’s decision-makers come from the 20th-century secret police agencies, and they can order a crackdown come what may. If that’s the case, they’ll try to shut down YouTube. But either way, we’ll keep doing our thing and find new avenues to reach our fellow Russian viewers. See you tomorrow!