Internet giants against the law on the site registry

We have an unequivocal attitude to the amendments to the law “On Information”, which we can adopt in the State Duma - this is a raw, unfinished draft law. Its adoption can lead to the saddest consequences, such as: censorship, stagnation of the development of UGC and the Russian Internet industry as a whole. The projects of “Rambler” and “Posters” will not follow the example of the Russian “Wikipedia” and will not close in indicative mode, but the situation worries us a lot. I hope that common sense will prevail, and lawmakers will heed the weighted comments of the RAEC. ”

For civil society, both the need to combat child pornography and illegal content in general are obvious, as well as the maintenance of constitutional principles such as freedom of speech and access to information.

Further

The State Duma is considering Bill No. 89417-6 “On Amendments to the Federal Law“ On Protecting Children from Information Harmful to Their Health and Development ”and certain legislative acts of the Russian Federation on the issue of restricting access to illegal information on the Internet.”

Among other things, this draft law proposes amendments to the law “On Information, Information Technologies and on Protection of Information”. They concern very important issues and affect the interests of many parties: citizens, the state, the Internet industry. Such decisions should not be made hastily, as is happening now.

The proposed methods give rise to possible abuses and raise numerous questions from users and representatives of Internet companies.

We believe that it is necessary to maintain a balance of public interests, as well as take into account the technological features of the Internet. Therefore, it is necessary to postpone consideration of the bill and discuss it on open sites with the participation of representatives of the Internet industry and technical specialists.

We always advocate the need to protect children, but it is obvious that the unprecedented measures imputed by this law will not be able to solve this problem. At the same time, due to insufficient development, many difficulties will arise, some of which are already obvious now, and some still remain completely unpredictable. Sadly, the new restrictions are likely to affect honest operators and generally ordinary people who use the Internet.

Further

Among the consequences that the bill can lead to are slowing down the speed of Internet traffic in the country by 5–15%, as well as the possibility of easily, literally placing one paragraph of text, discredit any site. In addition, imagine the problems of millions of people who will not be able to use their favorite resources and with regular “disconnections” will make a choice in favor of stably operating resources registered outside of Russia.

All this together will drastically throw back the entire industry, and those who are used to breaking the rules know a lot of schemes, how to get around the law, and will easily continue their activity.
beyond the limitations. Moreover, the bill does not imply any further struggle and ways to bring pedophiles or drug dealers to justice, and the main danger of their actions is not in the network, but offline.

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.

Further

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.