Navalny will sue cable operators due to the disconnection of "rain"

The Society for the Protection of Consumer Rights of the Fund for Corruption of Alexei Navalny intends to file claims in defense of the indefinite circle of consumers, whose rights are violated by the actions of cable television operators who excluded the rain television channel from their packages. The politician himself announced this in his LiveJournal.

“This is a paid service. A person is connected because there is“ rain ”in his package,” wrote Navalny. “When they put it before the fact: we turn off one of the channels without any significant and legal reasons, then this is a violation of consumer rights.”

The politician emphasized that "hmyri from cable networks, of course, are not outraged by anything, but are simply political prostitutes who are obviously illegally indicating the introduction of censorship."

According to Navalny, his supporters will also send a complaint to the Federal Antimonopoly Service. “What is happening now with the disconnection of the channels is just classic“ coordinated actions ”of channels that violate antimonopoly legislation,” the opposition is sure.

On January 26, a survey was conducted on the Rain website, did Leningrad need to be saved in order to save hundreds of thousands of lives? ”, Which caused a wide resonance in the blogosphere. Later, the channel recognized the survey by a mistake and apologized for it. The survey was condemned in the State Duma, and the deputies of the St. Petersburg Zaks asked the prosecutor's office to check the TV channel and punish it "up to the closure."

Later, the largest telecommunications operator Rostelecom and a number of other companies in Russia, including Akado, Er-Telecom and Vimpelcom, stopped the broadcasting of Rain. On Monday, it became known that the agreement with the rain was terminated by the last large cable operator - Tricolor -TV. Broadcasting will be discontinued on February 10.

In Roskomnadzor, they came to the conclusion that the rain violated article 49 of the Law "On Media", which states that "in the implementation of professional activities, the journalist is obliged to respect the rights, legitimate interests, honor and dignity of citizens and organizations." However, the channel was not warned, limited to preventive writing.

On Tuesday, Rain announced his readiness to transmit his signal to Russian cable television operators for free. The corresponding statement was published on Facebook by the owner of the rain Alexander Vinokurov and on the website of the television channel . The proposal is valid from February 1 to the end of 2014.

The adoption of such a decision is explained in the document "The events of the last days."

The channel assured that he could immediately sign the relevant additional agreements to the contracts concluded with the operators. "The proposal applies to all Russian cable operators. Including MTS, with which we recently had to stop cooperation for commercial reasons," the statement said.

"We believe that honest open relations in our joint business are much more important and stronger than temporary misunderstandings and emotional decisions," the document says.

Meanwhile, the Ombudsman Vladimir Lukin and the head of the Presidential Council for Human Rights Mikhail Fedotov previously also demanded to open a criminal case against cable operators who turned off the broadcasting of the rain. They stated that there were signs of a cartel conspiracy that seriously violates the rights and legitimate interests of viewers, which are unilaterally deprived of access to the media products paid.