VK is preparing the infrastructure for a traffic surge in the event YouTube is disabled. Vedomosti writes about this, citing its sources.
According to the publication, the company is negotiating with major operators to install caching servers on their networks in order to speed up the download of video content from users. Experts believe that its own CDN (“content delivery network”) will allow VK to prepare for a traffic surge in the event of YouTube shutting down. In addition, VK is now actively poaching bloggers from YouTube. State funding of the CDN infrastructure is not planned, the Ministry of Digital Development emphasized.
It seems that VK is installing CDN servers as a preventive measure, a kind of “hurt” in case YouTube is blocked, a Forbes source in one of the operators believes: “In this case, VK will have a large-scale surge in traffic.” “If there is a task to create an alternative to foreign services (and this is mostly YouTube), then only one service can compete – this is VK,” said a Forbes source familiar with the company’s negotiations with operators. In Russia, YouTube accounts for about 35% of all traffic, said Denis Kuskov, CEO of TelecomDaily.
In May 2022, Google (which owns YouTube and the Android platform) notified some Russian providers of the termination of contracts for servicing GGC servers. According to the head of “Ordercom” Dmitry Galushko, then Google stopped working with three regional telecom operators. In September 2022, it became known that Microsoft and Netflix removed servers from Russia that speed up content downloads.
Source: Rosbalt
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