Yandex considers refusing to aggregate news reports from unlicensed media

The news aggregator Yandex.News might refuse to use the work of news sources that are not licensed media outlets in Russia, wrote the head of the service, Tatiana Isaeva, on Facebook.

“It is becoming impossible to meet the requirements for checking all incoming media, which flows in the tens of thousands... So yes, aggregators need to stop cooperating with unlicensed media,” she said.

The Russian Duma is reviewing a bill on online news aggregators this week that may force services like Yandex.News to restrict their actions in certain ways, in order to not be held responsible for content posted on their sites unless the content was generated by licensed media.

Yandex's spokesperson, Asya Melkumova, said no final decisions in regards to the future operation of Yandex.News have been made at this point, as the company has yet to review the final version of the bill, which may yet be revised or replaced by additional proposals.

Matvey Alekseev, a spokesperson for Rambler&Co, said in an interview with RBC that the aggregator would never to “change the parameters of [its] interaction [with news sources] under the law … and review its databases for those media that lack the necessary status.”

The spokesperson for the Mail.ru Group refused to comment on the future behavior of its aggregator, Novosit@Mail.ru, in the event of new legislation.

• Yandex.Novosti is Russia’s largest Internet news aggregator, with an average monthly audience of 24.8 million people and a daily audience of 6.3 million people in April 2016, according to TNS Russia. This is more than the audience of any single news source in Russia. For comparison, the website of newspaper RBC attracted a daily audience of 1.6 million in April 2016 (according to TNS Russia) and the website of news agency RIA Novosti attracted a daily audience of 1.3 million people in April 2016 (according to Liveinternet data).
• On a daily basis, Yandex.News displays over 100,000 articles from almost 7,000 news sources, according to the company's own reports. Currently, Yandex does not discriminate between licensed and unlicensed news sources.