New law threatens free internet
Alla Zabrovskaya, Google Russia PR Director
The State Duma, in the name of the safety of children, adopted in the second and third readings a bill No. 89417-6, which provides for blocking by hosting providers and telecom operators of websites containing illegal content. We certainly support the intention of legislators to protect children on the Internet. However, we believe that the possible negative consequences of the application of the law will exceed the expected positive effect, putting at risk user access to legal resources.
Over the past few years, we have done a lot to protect children online. All of our products have built-in custom filters , including safe search and YouTube safe viewing . We also launched the “ Useful to know ” educational portal and the “ Child safety handbook ” in Russia, where information about risks on the Internet is collected. Google categorically does not accept the availability of child pornography on the Internet: we remove such content from all of our resources and from the results of search results.
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The adopted law provides for blocking of Internet resources by hosting providers and telecom operators by domain names and network addresses. Since many websites and services can be located on a single IP address, this means that by restricting access to a particular material, other resources that do not violate the law can be closed.
What will it look like in practice? Today, 1,300,000 blogs hosted on Blogger are blocked in Russia as a result of a court decision restricting access to one blogpost that has been recognized as extremist. As soon as Google became aware of the existence of such material, it was removed because contradicted Russian laws and policies for using Blogger. However, the Russian telecom operator, which blocked by its IP address in accordance with a court decision, continues to restrict access to the entire resource.
Many of our users remember another case: in July 2010, the district court of Komsomolsk-on-Amur ordered a local provider to restrict access to the entire YouTube resource by domain name because of one video, which the court recognized as extremist and which the YouTube team deleted, receiving notification.
Until now, these were isolated cases, but with the entry into force of the law, this practice may become the norm. First of all, Russian Internet users, who will not be able to get access to legal content, will suffer from it.
We are convinced that there are more effective ways to combat illegal content than those proposed in the law. We hope for a constructive dialogue between legislators, representatives of the industry and the user community in order to jointly develop effective methods of protecting users of the Network that would not restrict access to legal information and would not become an obstacle to the development of the Internet in Russia.
The State Duma, in the name of the safety of children, adopted in the second and third readings a bill No. 89417-6, which provides for blocking by hosting providers and telecom operators of websites containing illegal content. We certainly support the intention of legislators to protect children on the Internet. However, we believe that the possible negative consequences of the application of the law will exceed the expected positive effect, putting at risk user access to legal resources.
Over the past few years, we have done a lot to protect children online. All of our products have built-in custom filters , including safe search and YouTube safe viewing . We also launched the “ Useful to know ” educational portal and the “ Child safety handbook ” in Russia, where information about risks on the Internet is collected. Google categorically does not accept the availability of child pornography on the Internet: we remove such content from all of our resources and from the results of search results.
')
The adopted law provides for blocking of Internet resources by hosting providers and telecom operators by domain names and network addresses. Since many websites and services can be located on a single IP address, this means that by restricting access to a particular material, other resources that do not violate the law can be closed.
What will it look like in practice? Today, 1,300,000 blogs hosted on Blogger are blocked in Russia as a result of a court decision restricting access to one blogpost that has been recognized as extremist. As soon as Google became aware of the existence of such material, it was removed because contradicted Russian laws and policies for using Blogger. However, the Russian telecom operator, which blocked by its IP address in accordance with a court decision, continues to restrict access to the entire resource.
Many of our users remember another case: in July 2010, the district court of Komsomolsk-on-Amur ordered a local provider to restrict access to the entire YouTube resource by domain name because of one video, which the court recognized as extremist and which the YouTube team deleted, receiving notification.
Until now, these were isolated cases, but with the entry into force of the law, this practice may become the norm. First of all, Russian Internet users, who will not be able to get access to legal content, will suffer from it.
We are convinced that there are more effective ways to combat illegal content than those proposed in the law. We hope for a constructive dialogue between legislators, representatives of the industry and the user community in order to jointly develop effective methods of protecting users of the Network that would not restrict access to legal information and would not become an obstacle to the development of the Internet in Russia.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/147625/
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