Facebook, Twitter and Google may be subject to sanctions in Russia

The head of Roskomnadzor, Alexander Zharov, sent letters to Facebook, Twitter and Google warning them to stop “illegal actions”. On this on Wednesday 20 May reported by Russian media.

The Russian Ministry believes that American companies violate the requirements of the legislation of the Russian Federation, in particular the so-called “law on bloggers”, which came into effect on August 1 of 2014 of the year. In accordance with the provisions of this act, bloggers whose texts read more than 3 thousands of users per day should certainly be included in the Roskomnadzor registry. This rule, according to Russian officials, called companies is not always respected.

Violators face sanctions. Speech on administrative fines and (or) blocking of certain pages in social networks. Thus, for the start, companies can punish 300 thousand rubles, then in the case of a “relapse”, they can punish 500 thousand. In addition, the suspension of the activities of Internet entities for up to 30 days is not excluded. In this case, the verdict in each case is made by Roskomnadzor itself.

The head Alexander Zharov presented his claims to the representatives of the IT giants as 18 in May. Nothing is known about their reaction yet.

According to the official representative of Roskomnadzor, Vadim Ampelonsky, such letters are becoming a common practice in communicating with the Russian department of foreign Internet companies.

The head of the RosKomSvoboda project, Artem Kozlyuk, in an interview with the Russian service of Voice of America, confirmed that foreign IT giants receive such messages from Russian state agencies, primarily Roskomnadzor, regularly.

“As explained by representatives of the same Roskomnadzor, this has a stimulating effect on companies, after which they actively begin to listen to various applications of the department, including restricting access to certain records in social networks or tweets,” he added. “In this peculiar way, our government agencies are trying to organize the work of foreign Internet companies in processing various bureaucratic documents received from Russian state structures.”

At the same time Kozlyuk did not undertake to judge the effectiveness of such steps.

“As law enforcement practice has shown, both Twitter and Facebook today are increasingly trying to more thoroughly understand the applications of state agencies,” he continued. - Initially, they mostly satisfied them, as they say - without looking, almost automatically blocking groups in social networks or tweets. But then they began to take a more careful approach to the matter, and sometimes to reject Roskomnadzor’s applications. ”

Apparently, this position of foreign Internet companies fell short of Roskomnadzor, the expert suggested.

“They are used to meeting their requirements in full,” he believes.

In his opinion, the next initiative of Roskomnadzor, in fact, is precisely aimed at “reinserting customers”.

Co-chairman of the Association of Internet Users (IPA), Executive Director of Wikimedia Ru, Stanislav Kozlovsky, in his commentary to Voice of America, noted that before this Roskomnadzor and American companies had worked closely enough with each other.

“Formally, Roskomnadzor, of course, has the right to lawfully block Twitter, Google and Facebook,” he explained. “Whether they do this or not is the second question.”

Stanislav Kozlovsky recalled that Wikipedia has been included in the Russian registry of “unwanted sites” for quite a long time, although it has not yet been blocked.

“However, it is in the registry and can be blocked at any time,” he says. “And this has been going on for more than two years.”

In principle, there is a moral readiness that sooner or later the Internet in Russia will be destroyed in Russia, the co-chairman of the API believes.

“However, while the authorities are holding something back,” he believes.

The head of the RosKomSvoboda project, Artem Kozlyuk, is sure that in fact a kind of “virtual hatchets” have hung over IT companies for a long time, and every month they become more and more.

“There are a lot of current laws, and those whose validity period comes into force during the current year - for example, the law on the transfer of data from Russians to the territory of the Russian Federation,” he specified. “This allows Russian state agencies to block any Internet service, in any case, regardless of its attendance and direction of work.”

Earlier, the Ukrainians were called to boycott Facebook.