Roskomnadzor gave Google three months to create a new legal entity

Roskomnadzor requires Google to register a new legal entity on the territory of the Russian Federation in order to comply with the law on “information disseminators”. For fulfillment of the requirement, Google and other foreign companies are given three months, according to the Izvestia newspaper .

According to the new Russian laws, Google and other foreign companies owning news aggregators need to change the form of their presence on the Russian market. In particular, this also applies to Microsoft, which owns a search engine and aggregator Bing. In case of non-compliance with the requirements, the regulator will have reasons for blocking resources.

According to the updated legislation of the Russian Federation, all news aggregators from 2017 will be placed in a separate register. It will include only the largest aggregators, whose traffic exceeds 1 million visitors per day. The largest aggregators belong to Russian companies (Yandex, Rambler, Mail.ru), but there are also two foreign players in the Russian market represented by Google and Bing from Microsoft.
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The requirement for Google to register a new legal entity (or add new activities to the old one) is due to the fact that, according to the documents, the Russian representative office of Google, Google LLC, is engaged in promotional activities in the country. The Microsoft representative office, Microsoft Rus LLC, according to the Register, is engaged in “developing software and consulting in this area” and “creating and using databases and information resources, including Internet resources”. And if for Microsoft Microsoft Rus LLC can come as a platform for the implementation of the law, then Google will either have to make changes or register a new legal entity.

“The legal entity must comply with the requirements of the law. Advertising activity is not suitable for the activity of the news aggregator, ”explained the head of the legal department of the focal point of the national domain of the Internet, Sergey Kopylov, for Izvestia.

If Google does not fulfill the requirements of the regulator, then as a precautionary measure before blocking, penalties can be applied to it as part of administrative responsibility for violation of the procedure for providing information on activities under Art. 14.25 of the Administrative Code. In this case, the penalty will be up to 5 thousand rubles.

“Three months is a normal period for which serious companies can take shape in Russia, but if necessary, you can meet and give them more time, but you need to fulfill the requirements of the law,” said Alex Kazakov, co-author of the law on news aggregators.