On Wednesday, as many as 100 million Russians suddenly had their access to WhatsApp cut off, according to the Financial Times. Meanwhile, an app called Max that looks a bit like WhatsApp—albeit based on the Chinese “everything app” WeChat—Honored by celebrities, plugged into teachers, and preinstalled on mobile devices. Many Russians may now have no choice but to start trusting it, even though it clearly requires users to allow their activity to be shared with the government and there is no overt encryption, according to The Insider.

yesterday, Russians’ access to WhatsApp’s competitor Telegram has also been cut.

If your lowest expectations around civil liberties in Russia give you the impression that this kind of crackdown is entirely expected, you’re not entirely wrong. But it could still be a big authoritarian move, especially if it succeeds in driving most Russians to the Max.

A lot has changed in Russia since the beginning of the 2020s. A large protest movement in neighboring Belarus was brutal stopped with Putin’s supportchanges in political structure leaving little doubt that Putin will be president as long as he wantsand the rise and sudden fall (and later, death) of support for Alexey Navalny—Once seen as a credible political opponent—all steps away from Russia’s rules on free expression. And that was all before the current war.

Amid a series of arrests of protesters and censorship efforts to block media sources after the start of the all-out invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Amnesty International Called the free speech crackdown “unprecedented.” Now a few years later, such a thing seems even more commonplace.

It’s also worth noting that Russia’s authoritarian reach sometimes exceeds its grasp where these crackdowns are concerned. The state made a fool of itself by trying and failing to knock out Telegram back in 2018, only to cripple the functionality of a bunch of other internet services.

In December last year, WhatsApp COMPLAINANT that Russia has arbitrarily slowed down its service—about a 70% slowdown, according to the Financial Times.

But this is not another slowdown. Russia’s internet regulator simply removed WhatsApp on Wednesday from its directory, essentially removing it from the Russian internet.

WhatsApp’s statement to the Financial Times called it an “attempt to bring users to a state-owned surveillance app,” and said Russia was trying to “isolate more than 100 million people from private and secure communications.”

The Russian state justifies all this by claiming that it is an effort to ensure technological sovereignty while under sanctions, and protect citizens from fraud and terrorism. And if there is no a thriving industry of WhatsApp scammersonly others occasional major crackdowns it is easier to deny that part of salvation. And many countries, For example in Francethere are alternatives to WhatsApp that top government officials are encouraging their citizens to use in the name of technological sovereignty. Also, documents discovered by the ACLU strongly suggests that Meta, the parent company of WhatsApp, is complicit in the US government’s surveillance of its users.

All of this is not to defend Russia’s internet crackdown, just to point out that if apps like WhatsApp are considered more trustworthy, it may be difficult for a state to impose an unencrypted app on its people that facilitates government surveillance.