In uniform

The self -regulation of the Internet is over

October 1, 2009 Andrey Soldatov

A bill on the regulation of the Internet, recently issued by the Ministry of Justice for public discussion , if approved, completely eliminates one of the key areas of the Russian network from this very public discussion. Registration of domains will be under the control of the Ministry of Communications and special services.

First of all, it should be noted that the Target-group, which the project is aimed at, is quite clearly indicated-these are site owners, but not their users. The project has no traces of those traditional “horror stories” that have been expected from the Kremlin for the past few years-universal control over users, the requirements of the passport at the entrance to the Internet cafe, etc.

In addition, despite the seven -year prison sentence proposed by the project, a hacker who will be dropped by kremlin.ru will not be valid under the law. The law clearly states that they will be planted only for the collapse of “critical objects”, which should be understood as those sites, the violation of the activities of which will entail “deterioration of the safety of the population of the population”, and for a long time. It is unlikely that there is a prosecutor who can prove that the hacking of the presidential site is able to somehow affect the life of the population.

The Russian state machine is not at all attracted by total and daily control over all Internet users in that old -fashioned style that is implemented only in Central Asia and several other states of the Middle East.

In full accordance with the theory of the new public pact with the population, the government provides itself with control over several key spheres, not disturbing the layman of the annoying (and often meaningless) measures of control, which so much has been influenced even by the most loyal Soviet citizens during stagnation.

However, in those areas that are interested in power, the rules are changing, and even the very nature of the changes is taken beyond the discussion.

As often happens with similar initiatives, the most dangerous innovations are spelled out at the end of the text and are in no way related to the general content. Although the draft law is called “on amendments to certain legislative acts of the Russian Federation on the issues of ensuring the safety of state information resources”, the last two and most important points have nothing to do with state resources-this is a clause on the duties of providers during operational-search measures (ORM) and a item on national domains.

At the same time, the point on the ORM only approves the existing practice: it is not a big secret that at present, in accordance with Article 11 of the Law on the police, law enforcement agencies for operational-search measures have the right to demand from the providers “any information that does not apply to special types of secrets”, which is made by the Ministry of Internal Affairs, receiving data on customer IP addresses simply according to the call. The initiation of a criminal case, and even more so the court decisions are not required for this.

In the same way, providers go towards the Ministry of Internal Affairs when blocking resources.

The main danger of this project is in paragraphs that are going to introduce to the law “On Information, Information Technologies and on Information Protection” (by the way, adopted only in 2006) and which change the procedure for the existence of national domain names.

In fact, a mini-revolution is performed-if earlier the issues of registration of domains were resolved by self-regulation, by special bodies of Internet community (in our country-first Rosnihiros, and since 2006 the Coordinating Council of the National Domain, the founders of which have become four public organizations, but not the state), now it will be completely different departments-the Ministry of Essence and the FSB.

I quote the project: “The rules for registering domain names in the national domains of the Russian Federation are agreed with the federal executive body in the field of communication and the federal executive body authorized in the field of security.” It is curious that for the first time, special services are given the right to interfere with the Internet structure, not constrained by the security framework - the Ministry of Communications (at least the relevant department) and the FSB on an equal footing will determine the rules for the domain space.

At the same time, even the public that is considered such according to the Kremlin’s version - that is, the State Duma, will not be allowed to develop these rules, since the bill does not establish the rules themselves, but the fact that they will be determined by two departments.

Thus, subsequently, there will be enough departmental instructions signed by signalmen and Chekists so that the procedure for registering domain names is supplemented, for example, an obligatory period of consideration of the application (which, in turn, suggests a separate state of the considered) or certification of site owners after a certain period of time (apparently, this is how the rules should include ... the procedure for registering domain names in cases of identification violations of the law ").

By the way, even the overflowing newspapers can be closed, but not deprived of their name, and this procedure is defined by federal law, and not the "Rules for the registration of newspapers" agreed with the Ministry of Communications and the FSB. The fact that the new rules should ensure the complete transparency of domain owners is already a common place.

This new understanding of how the Internet should now work is confirmed by an explanatory note, which emphasizes that "the current self -regulation mechanism in this area is not able to protect the personality, society and the state in conditions of anonymity."

Apparently, the authors of the bill are going to kill two birds with one stone at once: to get out of both anonymity and the self -regulation mechanism.

RIA Novosti drawing