Roskomnadzor began negotiations with Opera about filtering prohibited sites

The state regulator in the face of Roskomnadzor began negotiations with the company Opera Software, the manufacturer of the popular Opera browser, about filtering (blocking) websites prohibited on the territory of the Russian Federation at the software level, Kommersant reports .

The product Opera Software is known for having built-in VPN and Turbo mode, which make it easy for the general consumer to bypass the site lockout from the territory of the Russian Federation.

So far, no results have been achieved. Not so long ago, Opera Software ended a deal to sell the consumer business, including browsers, and was bought by a consortium of Chinese investors for $ 575 million. It is the change of ownership that can affect the software vendor’s "flexibility" and the outcome of the negotiations.
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In addition, filtering Internet resources and pages at the software (browser) level is an unprecedented situation, and agreeing to the Roskomnadzor proposal may cause serious reputational damage to the Opera Software business. According to various estimates, Opera’s audience is not as large as Chrome, IE and Firefox, but still makes up about 7% of Runet users. Built-in functions that allow you to bypass the blocking of sites using the "boxed" functionality of the product, make the Opera browser even more attractive to users from the Russian Federation.

It should be noted that the Opera Software Roscomnadzor will not be able to co-operate. Not long ago, during the restructuring, the company closed its Moscow office, the Russian legal entity representing the company is also in the process of liquidation. If in the case of popular online services and social networks, such as Linkedin, Roskomnadzor can use the administrative apparatus, in the case of Opera it has much less leverage.

It is likely that the next contender for the negotiations will be the company “Yandex” with its product “Yandex Browser”. Following the example of Opera, Yandex.Browser has implemented a turbo mode that is similar in its operating principle, which allows you to bypass the blocking of sites by Roskomnadzor. In the future, coercion to cooperation of other technological giants in the face of Mail.ru Group and Microsoft is possible. Representatives of these three organizations have not yet commented on the situation.