Russia's "blacklist" law will hit online businesses.
A few days ago it became known that the companyLast week, Russia passed a controversial law that calls for the creation of a registry of websites containing "prohibited information" and their subsequent blocking. Many analysts are calling the law the beginning of censorship in Russia. Furthermore, the law introduces a number of risks to the normal conduct of online business in the country.
The Law "On the Protection of Children from Information Harmful to Their Health and Development" proposes the creation of a unified registry in Russia for domains and websites containing illegal content. This registry will include websites and web addresses known to distribute child pornography, promote suicide, and promote and distribute drugs.
Website owners will be warned about illegal content and given 24 hours to remove it. If the website owner fails to comply, the request will be filed with the hosting provider. If neither the website owner nor the hosting provider removes the content, the website will be blacklisted. Internet service providers will be required to block access to the website.
The law was passed despite protests from many internet companies, including the Russian-language section of Wikipedia, the social network VKontakte, the LiveJournal service, Yandex, and many others.
The law states that not only individual pages but also entire domain names must be blocked. This means that anything hosted on a specific domain, such as livejournal.com, could be blocked after a single blog with "illegal content" appears.
Furthermore, the law contains a "trap" in its definition of page identifiers. Specifically, the bill's authors propose blocking websites by IP address, ignoring the fact that a single IP address could host multiple websites, which would become innocent victims of such blocking.
Despite the fact that participants in the Russian Internet market proposed replacing "domain names" with "universal page locators (URLs)" in the description of resource formation principles, this was not done.
Many analysts believe that this type of law will make the Russian internet an unattractive environment for online businesses. Furthermore, the bill could lead to slower internet access, resulting from filtering at the backbone provider level.
Experts compare the Russian law "On the Protection of Children from Information Harmful to Their Health and Development" with bills to combat intellectual property violations –SOPA and PIPA (Stop Online Piracy Act and PROTECT IP Act), which were attempted to be passed in the United States last year. However, a global outcry against these bills led to SOPA and PIPA being withdrawn.
