Roskomnadzor formulated criteria for assessing prohibited information

Roskomnadzor plans to gain the right to independently block mirrors of previously banned sites.

On August 4, 2016, Roskomnadzor published a draft document introducing criteria for evaluating information, according to which authorized departments and the court can make decisions on including web pages in the Unified Register of Banned Sites.

The document contains a list of signs of child pornography, information about how drugs are made and used, information about methods of suicide and calls for it, as well as prohibited advertising of gambling. However, only in the case of information about drugs, an exception is made for works of art "which describe information that is justified by their genre."

In addition, the draft states that, in addition to the prohibition of information by authorized bodies in accordance with the listed criteria or by a court, pages can be entered by Roskomnadzor into the Unified Register even if they correspond to the description of materials that have already been entered into this register.

We fear that the legalization of Roskomnadzor's extrajudicial blocking of mirrors of previously blocked sites and pages with content similar to that blocked could lead to abuse in practice - at least in relation to pages that the courts ban as extremist, and not always legally.

Sources

• On approval of the Criteria for evaluating materials and (or) information necessary for decision-making by the Federal Service for Supervision of Communications, Information Technology and Mass Communications, the Ministry of Internal Affairs of the Russian Federation, the Federal Service for Supervision of Consumer Rights Protection and Human Welfare, the Federal Tax Service Service on inclusion of domain names and (or) site page indexes in the information and telecommunications network "Internet", as well as network addresses that allow identifying sites on the Internet containing prohibited information, into a single automated information system "Unified Register of Domain Names, pointers to pages of sites in the information and telecommunications network "Internet" and network addresses that make it possible to identify sites in the information and telecommunications network "Internet" containing information, the distribution of which is prohibited in the Russian Federation" // Federal portal of projects of normative legal acts. 2016. August 4.