Conscious necessity

The State Duma has submitted a bill on the ban on the use of anonymizer programs and VPN to bypass site blocking. The document is published in the basis of the legislative initiatives of the lower house.

It is proposed to submit to the law on information a new article 15.8, which will prohibit "owners of information and telecommunication networks, information systems and programs for electronic computing machines, as well as owners of information resources, including sites and pages of websites" Internet "to provide access to blocked sites."

In accordance with the new amendments, Roskomnadzor will identify resources on the Internet, "which can be used on the territory of the Russian Federation to bypass access restrictions." After the discovery of such a resource, officials will have to contact its owner and notify him of the need to “independently limit access” to the anonymizer or “take other necessary and sufficient measures” to stop the use of such a service in Russia. On his own application, the owner of the anonymizer can also access the register of prohibited sites and block them on their own.

If the administration of the service that allows access to prohibited sites within 30 days from the date of receipt of the notification will not fulfill the requirements of officials, then Roskomnadzor will block it. The bill proposes to create a separate register of anonymizers, access to which is prohibited.

In the same article, it is proposed to oblige “search engine operators” to remove the links to blocked sites from the search results. For this, search engines will also provide access to the registry of Roskomnadzor.

As stated in the explanatory note to the document, the practice of sites blocking in 2012 "revealed insufficient efficiency of locks." In Russia, there is currently no ban on the use of technologies for bypassing locks, however, access to some such resources is already limited by court decisions, and is noted in the note. "There is a wide range of opportunities for the legitimate application of" such technologies, the authors of the project note, but they are used to obtain access to sites "access to which is limited on a legitimate basis."

The authors of the amendments assure that the mechanism of restricting access to the anonymizers they propose are introduced "in order to prevent the occurrence of harmful consequences" and "does not exclude the possibility of subsequent appeal of such decisions in court."

In addition, the authors of the initiative propose to cancel Article 10.2 of the Law on Information, which was part of the "Law on Bloggers" adopted in May 2014 . This article on the owners of pages on the Internet, whose attendance exceeded three thousand people a day, was superimposed with a number of restrictions: they had to check the reliability of the published information, not publish information about private life, they were forbidden to use mat and place materials containing pornography and "promoting the cult of violence and cruelty." Roskomnadzor maintains a register of bloggers, for failure to fulfill the requirements of the law, they are facing a blocking. In the explanatory note, the authors of the bill note that these norms have "discovered their inefficiency."

The bill was submitted to the State Duma by deputies Maxim Kudryavtsev ("United Russia"), Nikolai Ryzhak ("Fair Russia") and Alexander Yushchenko (Communist Party).

The Internet Ombudsman Dmitry Marinichev called the proposed measures to “madness”. “How will they separate the VPN, which is used for commercial purposes, from the VPN, which is used to circumvent blocking? This cannot be determined,” he said.

It is possible to technically prohibit the use of VPN on the final devices, said Marinichev, but, in his opinion, "it will simply be the persecution of his own citizens in his own country."

On April 19, Vedomosti wrote that Roskomnadzor developed a bill on the ban on bypassing site blocking . It is known that in the initiative of the department it was also proposed to oblige anonymizers and VPN services to block prohibited sites under the threat of blocking. The government project also provided for the duty of search engines not to issue links to prohibited sites. In Roskomnadzor, however, however, the development of such a document was not confirmed.

In Russia, by decision of the courts, anonymizers are already blocked for providing access to prohibited sites. According to Roskomsvoboda, about 100 such resources are blocked in total. So, on February 12, Roskomnadzor, by decision of the Buzluk district court of the Orenburg region, blocked the Hideme.ru VPN service for providing access to prohibited sites.

For the first time, the development of the bill on blocking anonymizers was reported in August 2013. Then the FSB made such an initiative. On February 5, 2015, State Duma deputy Leonid Levin proposed blocking anonymizers in a pre -trial manner.

On February 13, 2016, Roskomnadzor supported the proposal to be fined for calls to bypass sites . Then, Roskomsvoboda, under the threat of blocking by Roskomnadzor, was forced to remove instructions for the use of anonymizers from her site .

On March 17, the State Duma adopted in the first reading a bill on blocking the mirrors of sites prohibited for the illegal distribution of audiovisual works. The document introduces the concept of "derivative site on the Internet", that is, mirrors, and also determines the procedure for restricting access to such sites on the basis of copyright holders in the Moscow City Court and subsequent court orders. Search systems will be obliged to remove from the search results for links to mirrors, access to which is limited.

Anonymizers and VPN services allows you to change the IP address from which the user turns to external sites. Blocking also allow you to circumvent the built -in functions of browsers. In Opera and in Yandex Brauser, this is the Turbo mode, in Google Chrome - the traffic saving mode. We talk in detail about the methods of bypassing the blocking here .

Since March 13, 2014, the Grani website has been included in the register of prohibited resources for "calls for illegal activities and participation in mass events carried out in violation of the established procedure." By order of Roskomnadzor, providers throughout Russia block access to the "faces".