Roskomnadzor asks VPN services and anonymizers to block prohibited content

The head of the VPN service HideMe.ru Markus Saar recently said that Roskomnadzor is now trying to negotiate with VPN and anonymizers about blocking content prohibited in the Russian Federation. The HideMe website was blocked almost six months ago, Vedomosti reports. Despite the fact that the violation, which caused the blocking, was eliminated by the service staff almost immediately, Roskomnadzor was in no hurry to remove the unit. Instead, the department tried to get Saar to restrict access to the resources that Roskomnadzor has added to the block list.

The department's employees, in particular, sent the head of HideMe a letter asking about the availability of the technical possibility of restricting access to resources listed by the agency on the list of prohibited sites. According to Saar, such a request is not in the competence of the regulator, therefore this appeal was regarded as an attempt to put pressure, the service did not fulfill the request of Roskomnadzor.

But Cameleo anonymizer agreed to cooperate with Roskomnadzor. On this site, I wanted to place my ad for HideMe, but Roskomnadzor asked to remove the advertisement from the management of Cameleo.
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Vadim Ampelonsky, a representative of Roskomnadzor, said that anonymizers are banned in the Russian Federation, as stated in court decisions. The reason for blocking is the possibility of using such a service to gain access to the site blocked in Russia. If the anonymizer provides the ability to bypass the lock, it is blocked. If such a resource works according to the laws of the Russian Federation, the block is removed.

Artem Kozlyuk, the head of Roskomvoboda, recalls that Roskomnadzor has the authority to independently decide on the exclusion of an Internet resource from the registry of prohibited sites. So, if the anonymizer deleted the content prohibited by the court, the blocking is removed. In some cases, the regulator allows the owner of a blocked site to challenge the decision in the higher courts.


Vadim Ampelonsky argues that interaction with anonymizers requires separate regulation. At the same time, back in 2016, he said that Roskomnadzor, in general, calmly treats such blocking tools as proxy servers, anonymizers, VPN. According to him, using them is not against the law.

But copyright holders think differently. In the same 2016, the head of the National Federation of the music industry, Leonid Agronov, said that bypassing the resources prohibited in the Russian Federation was dangerous. The main threat is the possibility of encountering drug propaganda, terrorism, etc.