Roskomnadzor plans to deal with ways to circumvent blocking sites

Officials from Roskomnadzor have developed a bill that will help the agency in combating ways to circumvent website blocking, according to Vedomosti, citing sources in Internet companies. According to other data, representatives of the Media-Communication Union worked on the text of the document, who had previously noted the draft law on regulation of audio-visual services, approved in January . The essence of the document does not change from this and is that if it is adopted, Roskomnadzor will be able to put pressure on VPN services, search engines and anonymizers. The latter will be obliged to restrict access to the resources entered in the register of prohibited sites under the threat of sanctions from regulatory authorities.

The document implies amending the law on information and the Administrative Code. The explanatory note to the document states that the authors recognize the current system of restricting access to content as ineffective and the measures proposed in the amendments are intended to close these “holes”. At the same time, part of the blame rests on search engines that provide links to prohibited resources in search results, as well as on the technologies themselves, which allow to circumvent a clumsy blockage, the authors of the document say.

Thus, the bill states that the practice of blocking sites is inefficient due to the existence and mechanisms of the VPN services, proxy servers, anonymizers, etc. At the same time, redirecting traffic through these tools is recognized as legal and generally applicable, but not in the case of bypassing locks.
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It is assumed that, at the request of Roskomnadzor, the owners of VPN services and other traffic redirection tools will voluntarily add blocked resources to their own blacklists to restrict access to customers from the Russian Federation. It is also proposed to oblige the owners of search engines to filter the issue and not display blocked resources in the search results. Otherwise, the authors of the bill propose to penalize search engines in the amount of up to 700,000 rubles.

“Naturally, we are against the distribution of illegal content, but at the same time the law should not violate the rights and freedoms of a citizen for access to information,” said Sergey Grebennikov, director of the Regional Public Center for Internet Technologies (ROCIT). “Yes, the“ gray ”zones are used to commit illegal actions and disseminate prohibited content using anonymizers, but this does not mean at all that honest users should suffer. It is also important to note that the bills do not violate the rights of users who choose to use the Internet safely, for example, using a VPN connection, ”he concluded.

In fact, on the one hand, regulators and structures close to them are trying to justify the introduction of the site blocking practice, which turned out to be ineffective (they were warned about before creating a registry of banned sites and starting blocking), even further “tightening the screws”. On the other hand, they are trying to save face by talking about respecting the interests and rights of the spherical user, “who should not suffer”.

The Ministry of Communications and Mass Media did not comment on the initiative and stated that they did not receive such documents. However, if the bill is passed, the VPN connection - a tool that is popular primarily in the corporate segment to provide remote access to the internal infrastructure for employees, may end up outside the law.