Anapa prosecutors cleaned up the Internet in their own way. Block Google and others

The topic of blocking sites has been repeatedly touched upon by us in Habré as part of our activity in monitoring and providing legal assistance to site owners and information brokers. Every day locks are becoming more interesting and more interesting. And the worst thing is that the special legislation, which over the past two years began to appear like mushrooms after rain, is not able to establish uniform, clear and transparent for all new rules of the game in Runet.
Obviously, the new blocking laws affect too many members of the network - users, hosts, blog sites, media, web services, file sharing and other content-oriented sites. Internet providers from various regions of the country have increasingly begun to contact us through Roskomsvoboda . The reason - claims from regional prosecutors.



While the General Prosecutor’s Office is blocking major opposition media and well-known bloggers, local prosecutors are also awake and are fighting offenses in the network space in their own ways. Both those and others demonstrate that they do not need special laws in order to protect the rights of citizens and block illegal content on the Internet. I have to agree with Mr. Nosik that instead of adopting a lot of legislative acts (№139-, №187-, №398-), distracting deputies from other more important work in cases when it is necessary to expand the law again about blocking, and forcing each time the Runet to discuss another absurd blocking of the federal media or someone's page on social networks, lawmakers could adopt one single legal wording in the Federal Law “On Information” in order to limit the information:

Any sites may be blocked by any government or law enforcement agency for any reason, for an unlimited period without explanation and without prior notice to the site owner.
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Maybe in this form the norm sounds not constitutional, but it fully reflects the actual state of affairs. In general, I would recommend to change the Basic Law, specifying in Article 29 of the Constitution that in Russia censorship is permitted in cases provided for by law. What is really worth being in the light of recent events?

We had met with so-called “prosecutor’s locks” before (like, for example, the Novosibirsk prosecutor’s office against the Pussy Riot icon or the St. Petersburg prosecutor’s office against bribes ), but last week various local providers from the city of Anapa began to contact us, complained that the prosecutor's office finally exhausted them with blocking claims, which were submitted to the courts one after another. It is as if the Anapa prosecutors do not know at all about the existence of the Unified Register of Roskomnadzor and the regulated procedure for restricting access to information. For them, the most important thing is the protection of children. But not any children, but only Anapa! Let other prosecutors protect other children.

However, the said claims of prosecutors should be filed not in defense of the “indefinite circle of persons”, as provided for by Article 45 of the Code of Civil Procedure of the Russian Federation, but in defense of the “Anapa circle of persons”. So it will be more correct.
At the same time, I want to draw attention to the creative legal argument, which confirms the need for an immediate prosecutorial response:
“Access to information aimed at violating the integrity of the Russian Federation, undermining the security of the state, inciting social, racial, religious hatred, dislikes the culture of citizens of Russian nationality, undermines the foundations of the national security of the Russian Federation, violates the constitutional rights of citizens that they can use and protect regardless of nationality or race, should be closed. "


Prosecutors are convinced that they are obliged to go to court in order to “restore the violated rights of citizens”. In this case, we are talking about online casinos and poker clubs. I have only one question: really, there are only 9 online gaming sites in the entire Internet? Prosecutors do not know how to use search engines, or perhaps this is a strategic move to file such claims every week in order to increase the statistics of the law enforcement agency in the subject?

While Roskomnadzor, together with the Federal Drug Control Service, Rospotrebnadzor, are struggling with pedophiles, suicides and drugs in RuNet in an extrajudicial manner, prosecutors conduct their own sanitary work in the vast fields of Runet, filing a lawsuit to block websites without a register and applying special legal procedures detailed in the Federal Law No. 149- “On Information” and interdepartmental orders. At the same time, it is rather suspicious that the big three from the “big three” do not touch at all, but only small regional providers are brought to trial as Defendants. Does it not smack of monopoly collusion here with the involvement of law enforcement officers in order to knock out the small cattle from the saddle and take the whole market?
The very nature of such claims, in which the Defendants are providers, is a rather strange legal phenomenon. I can still understand when the provider is attracted as a third party to execute a court decision. But to make a defendant out of it, who, after the court’s decision as the losing party, is charged with all the legal costs of the case, obviously violates the principles of logic and law. With the same success it is possible to attract as a respondent the Post of Russia and demand that it be prohibited from issuing certain parcels sent in violation of federal legislation, or the HOA demanding not to allow him or any of the residents to enter the porch where the offender lives neighbors.

In the legal doctrine there is such a thing as "postman immunity . " The essence of this principle lies in the fact that when someone writes a letter to someone, the postman who delivers the letter to the recipient should under no circumstances be held responsible for what is written in it. It is absolutely reasonable to require such an approach to be applied online. However, such claims by prosecutors constantly undermine the “postman’s immunity,” which for a long time was one of the fundamental principles of the work on message transfer and transportation.




In addition, such law enforcement practice creates excessive judicial red tape for the already overloaded Russian courts, and, most importantly, the courts block this or that site forever , because after entering into legal force (and they enter quickly, because usually providers for a number of obvious reasons do not want to sue the prosecutor's office) no one reconsiders the decisions of the courts, and no one cancels the lock after removing “illegal content” from the site.
So, according to the latest lawsuit from the Anapa interdistrict prosecutor's office , Google's Q & A service will be permanently unavailable for users in normal mode (without VPNs and additional features) to users connected to one or another provider, and considering that the specified blockages are held "outside the registry ”, Users and site owners will never know why a network resource does not work in a particular region. This is a very dangerous trend. In the end, what was the point of the fact that deputies accepted all these amendments on blocking, and we discussed all these laws at numerous round tables on the development of domestic IT and the Internet, when the prosecutor's office has the ability to block any website without any grounds provided by law and without the use of a special order?

Since these blocks cannot be monitored by us independently, we ask all Internet providers who were attracted by similar claims as respondents to inform us about this. At the moment, we are preparing a collective appeal to the General Prosecutor’s Office and Roskomnadzor in order to stop this illegal practice. In addition, we are also ready to appeal against the decisions of the district courts in the courts of higher instances in order to put an end to this matter.