Roskomnadzor issued recommendations to telecom operators to block Zello's voice messenger. In several Telegram-channels there were copies of the department's letter to the operators. Employees of the two operators confirmed to Vedomosti receiving Roskomnadzor letters. One of them knows that all the operators have received such letters. Will the operators comply with the recommendation of Roskomnadzor, Vedomosti's interlocutors could not say.

Representatives of the "big three" operators declined to comment. "Vedomosti" expect a comment from Roskomnadzor.

The Zello blocking by Roskomnadzor is called an "experiment". As the letter says, Roskomnadzor analyzed the work of Zello and determined the subnets "which must be blocked to effectively degrade the Zello service." Roskomnadzor presented a list of 36 subnets to be blocked, of which 26 belong to Amazon. In total, these subnets contain almost 15 million IP addresses. Of these, Amazon accounts for 13.5 million addresses.

 Zello is an Internet radio, which allows you to instantly send a message to a friend or group, without typing in text and without being distracted by reading. It is popular with truckers, who used the messenger during protests against the system of collection of fees "Plato". Roskomnadzor blocked Zello in April 2017 for the fact that the service did not provide information on time for inclusion in the register of information dissemination organizers. Zello knows about this situation and gives its users tips on how to bypass the lock using VPN.

They share the experience of circumvention of blocking and users of the forum dedicated to gadgets of the forum 4pda and also advise to resort to using VPN. At least in February the application worked in Russia.

The correspondent of Vedomosti downloaded Zello in the AppStore, but the application did not work. The Zello.com website in Russia works and does not work at the same time, the correspondent of Vedomosti was convinced. An attempt to switch from the service page to Wikipedia was successful, but the page Zello in the App Store, when I tried to go to the developer's site, transferred to a "stub" that reported the blocking of the service according to "federal law".

This unprecedented initiative with a high degree of probability will give rise to the "pursuit of the shadow," says Irina Levova, director of strategic projects at the Institute for Internet Research. In her opinion, Zello can start changing addresses, forcing Roskomnadzor to force operators to block more and more large blocks of addresses. The results of this race can be unpredictable and dangerous, warns Levova.