Russian authorities block paywall removal site Archive.today

Paywall bypass site Archive.today and several associated domains (including .is and .ph) have been blocked by Russian authorities, according to error pages that appeared when their websites loaded.

The pages appeared to be blocked as of Monday when TechCrunch visited websites from the East Coast of the United States.

“Access to Internet resources has been blocked by decision of public authorities,” a Russian-language page said, citing the Russian government agency responsible for Internet censorship, Roskomnadzor.

According to a Roskomnadzor listing for Archive.is, authorities confirmed that “access is limited to the page,” but did not give a reason at the time of publication. Archive.today is not listed as blocked when TechCrunch is selected.

A Roskomnadzor representative did not immediately respond to TechCrunch’s inquiries outside business hours in Moscow.

TechCrunch was still able to access the archive sites from various other devices and networks, and was able to archive a web page regardless of the apparent block. It is not clear how extensive the ban was or who implemented it.

Archive.today is a well-known website for archiving copies of websites, including content usually hidden behind a paywall or subscription login. Wikipedia editors recently decided to remove hundreds of thousands of links to Archive.today, saying they had discovered that Archive.today code used visitors’ web browsers – without their knowledge – to bombard the website of a blogger who was criticizing Archive.today’s operations with unwanted network traffic.

The operators of the website behind Archive.today did not respond to a request for comment.

(free Ryan Uhuru on Bluesky)