The State Duma of the Russian Federation adopted in the first reading the law on Internet censorship. According to it, officials will be able to close websites without a court decision. Roskomnadzor is expected to become the supervisory authority.
The State Duma is considering several bills at once that directly affect the Internet. Many experts call these laws harmful, and the most dangerous are the developed changes in the draft law "On the protection of children from information that is harmful to their health and development." Under this law, officials are given the opportunity to close websites with prohibited information on the Internet without a trial. This kind of information includes child pornography, drug propaganda, information that encourages children to commit life-threatening actions, etc. It is planned that Roskomnadzor will instruct a non-profit organization to monitor sites with illegal information. After the discovery of such sites, all information about them will be transferred to Roskomnadzor, which is obliged to warn the owner of the resource about the detection of prohibited content. If within 24 hours the owners of the resource do not react in any way and do not delete it, then the telecom operator or hosting provider will be obliged to do this. It is assumed that a register of pages prohibited for distribution will be created on the Internet, reflecting the introduction of blocking of Internet resources. But according to this version of the bill, the list of blocked resources contains a number of subjective and evaluative categories. This gives the Internet community the right to talk about the threat of paralyzing a good half of the Russian Internet. Because blocking by IP addresses and domain names can lead to the prohibition of a number of bona fide resources. As it has already happened many times. Ochir Mandzhikov, a spokesman for Yandex, noted that the draft law requires serious improvements, especially in terms of the procedure for implementing the measures. It is necessary to involve leading industry experts in this and conduct public discussions.
