The ban is not an isolated case but part of a global race to control encrypted communications. From the United Kingdom to India, from the EU to China: states are increasingly determined to bend encryption for civilian use to the reasons of national security. Commentary by Andrea Monti, professor of digital identity, privacy and cybersecurity at the University of Rome-Sapienza – Originally published in Italian by Formiche.net
The FaceTime ban: what Russia has decided
A Reuters report has spread the news that Roskomnadzor, the Russian telecoms regulator, has decided to block the use of FaceTime — Apple’s audio-video messaging app — as part of a broader strategy to combat the use of foreign technologies for illegal activities.
Although the decision has been criticised for its censorship and repression of freedom of expression and privacy, the Russian regulator’s choice has a very different basis, one that is also common to the EU and other countries in the Indo-Pacific region, and is set to disrupt the cybersecurity sector in both the civil and military spheres.
India, United Kingdom, China, France, EU: the map of new restrictions
After Roskomnadzor, it was India’s turn to ask smartphone manufacturers to install a non-removable application for tracking devices. Shortly afterwards, New Delhi backtracked, but relaunched with a request to always leave GPS coordinate storage active.
Also in 2025, the British government asked Apple, which refused, to allow access to encrypted data contained in iPhones. In 2024, China had already banned WhatsApp, Telegram and Signal from the Apple App Store, and France had obtained privileged access to Telegram channels following the arrest of the company’s founder, Pavel Durov. For its part, the EU is not giving up on chat control — i.e., the obligation to install a system of “computer search” of connected devices that checks their content before it is encrypted and exchanged — an issue that has been analysed since 2020 on these pages.
The contradiction of encryption: from crypto phones to Apple versus the FBI
Even before these events involving multinational companies, or at least companies not directly involved in illegal activities, between 2018 and 2021, two Franco-Dutch police operations dismantled Encrochat and Sky ECC, two crypto phone infrastructures mainly used by organised crime thanks to their high level of resistance to interception by the authorities.
One of the themes that characterised those investigations was to consider the infrastructure operators as responsible, at least in terms of aiding and abetting the crimes committed by their users, due to the way in which the infrastructure itself had been designed.
Regardless of the legal issues and the sustainability of such a thesis, it was already clear at the time that there was a contradiction in not extending the same criterion to smartphone and application manufacturers, which essentially promised the same result.
Paradigmatic in this sense is the 2016 controversy between Apple and the FBI over the former’s refusal to “force” the security of its flagship product’s operating system. The refusal was based on the assumption that, in the name of protecting user rights, the system had been designed to be unhackable, even by Apple itself.
Although the FBI found its own way to obtain the necessary information, the case clearly raised the issue of whether there should be a limit to the free availability of communication tools that a state cannot control, regardless of the purpose of the control.
When security, policing and defence overlap
Back to the point, it is quite clear that the Russian regulatory authority’s decision is part of a widespread trend to use crime prevention as a legal basis to support national security and defence strategies that require comprehensive and widespread control.
On paper, there is formally (almost) everywhere a very precise boundary between the different areas of prevention, repression, defence and security.
This boundary can be more easily blurred — or even eliminated — in jurisdictions based on rule by law, and therefore on the political use of rules, but doing the same in systems based on the rule of law is certainly less straightforward, especially considering that the conditions for adopting special laws or suspending constitutional guarantees do not currently exist. Hence the need to resort to a narrative that presents the fight against crime as a justification for choices with much broader consequences.
The geo-economic risk: what could change for Big Tech and China
A side effect, but no less important, of Russia’s decision and the political positions taken by India and the EU is the potential closure of those markets to US Big Tech.
If, therefore, the conflict with Big Tech were to escalate to higher levels and lead to even a partial blockage of US technologies, it is not unlikely that Chinese industry and Beijing’s influence would benefit from this. The former would face reduced Western competition, while the latter would enjoy an extension of its influence, certainly not in the EU, but more likely in the Indo-Pacific region.
The dispute is over the recovery of technological sovereignty
The FaceTime ban once again confirms the thesis that the strategic game of communications security is played on the terrain of controlling one’s own areas of vulnerability.
Moscow has chosen a more direct route, while other countries have chosen (or been forced) to take more complex paths, but the goal remains the same: to reduce the technological autonomy of platforms and bring back into the public sphere what for years has been left to the private governance of Big Tech.