Internet users say the Chinese online store Alibaba.com has been blocked in Russia

Several Russian Internet users are reporting today that the Chinese online store Alibaba.com has been blocked in its entirety, according to the website Rublacklist.net, an "Internet freedom" project by the so-called Pirate Party of Russia.

According to Antizapret.info, another online project that monitors and logs websites banned in Russia, Russia's anti-drug officials have blacklisted a single page on Alibaba.com: an advertisement for "Aromatic Potpourri Incense Bags." The page was most recently banned on August 18, 2015, but it had also been banned twice before, on March 13, 2015, and August 22, 2014. It is unclear why some Russian Internet users are reporting a complete inability to access Alibaba.com.

According to Rublacklist.net, some of the Internet users reporting Alibaba.com's total inaccessibility are based in the Tula region, using the Internet provider Dom.ru.

Earlier this year, in April, officials from AliExpress, which represents Alibaba.com, met with representatives of Roskomnadzor, the government agency charged with managing Russia's Internet blacklist. According to reports, AliExpress agreed to comply with Russia's new law requiring websites to store the user data of Russian citizens on servers located inside Russia.

• Earlier in August, Roskomnadzor briefly banned the popular website Reddit. The offending content was a page titled, "Minimal and Reliable Methods for Growing Psilocybe [Mushrooms]." Because Reddit uses https protocol for secure communication, many Russian Internet providers (perhaps 30 percent, according to Roskomnadzor) would have blocked the website in its entirety.
• On August 20, Roskomnadzor threatened to block Wikipedia in Russia, following a court ruling in Astrakhan in late June against an entry on the website about charas (a hashish form of cannabis). Roskomnadzor sent a letter to Wikipedia's administrators, threatening to block the website in its entirety, if it refuses to delete the article in question. Wikipedia's representatives in Russia have refused to comply.