Providers will be punished for instructions on circumventing locks

“It’s not a blocking, but a mockery”

By law, telecom operators are obliged to block access to sites from the registry of prohibited resources. At the same time, users have the constitutional right to access such sites and have the full right to use tools to bypass blocking - VPN, proxy, anonymizer, Tor, browser plugins, services like Yandex.Turbo , Opera Turbo or Data Compression Proxy for Chrome.

It turns out a strange situation. It is especially offensive for Roskomnadzor and the Ministry of Communications and Mass Communications that the providers, for the convenience of users, talk about ways to bypass the site lock right on the stub that appears when trying to load a blocked site.

The Ministry of Communications and Mass Media is preparing a bill on which providers face fines for such actions.
')
“We proceed from the fact that punishment should be foreseen, when at the stub, which indicates that the site is blocked, the telecommunications operator places information on how to bypass this blockage,” said Deputy Minister of Communications Alexei Volin in a commentary for the Izvestia newspaper. “We consider it unacceptable to propagandize blocking bypass on a stub that blocks access to the site, because in this case, it’s not a blockage, but a mockery.”

The draft law on the introduction of fines for instructions on how to circumvent locks was developed in February by Roskomnadzor together with the right holders. In accordance with it, the Administrative Code of the Russian Federation is supplemented by new articles.

Article 13.32 . “Failure by the telecommunications operator to provide access to the information and telecommunications Internet, the duty to restrict and resume access to information” entails administrative responsibility for officials in the amount of 3,000 to 5,000 rubles, for entrepreneurs from 10,000 to 30,000 rubles, for legal entities - from 50,000 to 100 thousand rubles.

Article 13.33 . “Promotion of technical means and methods of access to information resources, access to which is prohibited by a court decision,” the penalties are the same as in 13.32.

The Ministry of Communications made changes to Article 13.33 so that it extends only to Internet providers, and not to ordinary sites like Geektimes, or to ordinary users who publish information about ways to bypass blockages.

According to independent lawyer Anton Bogatov, informing subscribers on stub pages is quite logical, otherwise customers will blame the provider for poor-quality communication services.