Zoom stops serving Russian government agencies. What will replace it?
Information has been confirmed that the world-famous video conferencing service Zoom, from March 31, 2021, prohibited Russian partners from selling its licenses to Russian government agencies and companies with state participation.
Currently, the authorized partners of the American Zoom service in Russia with the right to sell licenses are the Rightconf companies from the science city of Dubna near Moscow, the Moscow Rokada LLC, as well as the international corporation Unify Square, headquartered in the USA and almost a dozen offices around the world.
Authorized Russian partners do not comment on the reasons for the ban on issuing Zoom licenses to government agencies. However, low-level resellers, on condition of anonymity, tell the press that Zoom, for its part, does not give any explanations to its partners for its actions. At the same time, judging by the intonation of the message, we are talking about a long-term, and not a temporary suspension of authorization.
As you know, the Zoom video conferencing service was created for both private and commercial and corporate clients, and the price and capabilities for each category differ significantly.
Thus, the free version of the service is aimed at private users and small organizations. The associated software allows two clients to have an unlimited number of conferences, while group video conferences are limited to 40 minutes.
The commercial version of Zoom Pro requires an annual subscription of $150 and gives unlimited access to conference calls for up to a hundred participants. The license comes with a 1 GB cloud for recording video in MP4 format.
For corporate Zoom Business, service representatives want $200 per year and give permission for 300 participants to communicate in a group video conference. The most advanced Zoom Enterprise for $350 per year gives all the same, plus access to corporate IP telephony.
Russian legal entities had to purchase licenses either through authorized Zoom partners in our country or through their resellers. Individuals can obtain a license directly on the developer’s website.
Despite the relevance of video conferencing, Russian government agencies were in no hurry to implement Zoom. According to the government procurement website, service licenses were rarely purchased by Russian civil servants, with the exception of the office of the Council of Deputies of the Yakimanka municipal district in Moscow.
On the other hand, companies with state participation used the services of American services quite actively. For example, corporate licenses for Zoom were acquired by Gazprom, VTB, the Sheremetyevo Airport Authority, some museums and numerous universities with a vast geography - from Kaliningrad to Komsomolsk-on-Amur.
They write that for the Higher School of Economics (HSE), the deprivation of Zoom’s license was extremely unpleasant news, and currently the leadership of the country’s main liberal university has been feverishly negotiating for 4 months with one of the company’s Russian representative offices about renewing its paid corporate account. Judging by the fact that the HSE license expires on April 7 and there will be no new one, the negotiations were unsuccessful.
They are slandering that the service with the appropriate corporate license was until recently actively used by the Council of Ministers of the Republic of Crimea. According to rumors, the Minister of Culture of Crimea, Arina Novoselskaya, covered her careless subordinates with curly Voronezh hair at a video conference with Prime Minister Sergei Aksyonov, exactly using Zoom.
Judging by how the HSE and other government agencies are fighting for the right to legally use the American service, the service has undoubted advantages. However, according to highly respected publications, Zoom has a number of serious shortcomings, for which it is regularly criticized.
In particular, in March 2020, Vice Motherboard published an article reporting on the discovery of a “hole” in the Zoom service. It turned out that video communication does not have end-to-end encryption, and if the user is distracted from the active Zoom window for more than 30 seconds, its functions can be intercepted using Attention Tracking.
Around the same time, it was discovered that the then-fresh update of the Zoom application for iOS transferred personal data of users to Facebook, even if they did not have an account on the social network named after Zuckerberg.
Another “hole” in Zoom is the lack of restrictions on the number of password entries during authorization, which scammers claim is taking advantage of.
In general, it seems that the owners of Zoom, frightened by the sanctions of the US government, are personally trying to protect Russian government agencies from their leaky service.
In this regard, a logical question arises: if not Zoom, then what can domestic developers offer instead?
According to the Ministry of Digital Development, Zoom quickly acquired at least five Russian competitors. Moreover, a noticeable impetus to the development of our own video conferencing services occurred during the “Covid holidays”.
During 2020, two video conferencing services were launched in Russia and another one was already in development. They became:
“Mail.ru Video Calls”, initially focused on online learning, communication with colleagues or partners, and video calls with relatives.
“Telemost” from Yandex, and the Russian IT giant did a great and good deed by quickly decoupling the service from the browser, releasing a separate “Telemost” application for the most popular platforms: Windows, Mac OS, Android, iOS.
At the end of 2020, a message appeared that, by order of the Ministry of Education, the development of the Sferum service began, which has now already been tested in the Moscow region and in another 15 Russian regions.
In the winter of 2021, Sber (Sbermitap) and the Russian company Spirit (VideoMost) released their own services for video communications and webinars. Moreover, in terms of its functionality, VideoMost is as close as possible to Zoom, which, in theory, should facilitate a smooth transition of Russian government agencies and educational institutions from the American platform to the domestic one.
Recently it became known about the development of another domestic video conferencing service, TrueConf. It is reported that its developers took care of the security of their service in accordance with the requirements of the Personal Data Law. In particular, each user (if necessary) stores the archive of video conferences in a personally equipped “cloud”, and not in a publicly accessible one, as in Zoom. In addition, TrueConf provides more flexible settings.
Experts believe that Zoom is copying the actions of Microsoft, which refused to sell its software to the Moscow Higher Technical School named after them in December last year. Bauman out of fear of sanctions, since the Russian university trains specialists for the defense industry.
Observers do not rule out the introduction of retaliatory Russian sanctions against Zoom. In any case, an adequate alternative has already been created, which is why parting with the American service will not be painful, but going back to Zoom will be incredibly difficult, because a holy place is never empty.
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