Translated material
The President signed a law changing the mechanism of extrajudicial blockings
Hosters are obligated to block sites, the decision to terminate access to which was made out of court.
On June 8, 2020, Russian President Vladimir Putin signed a law obliging hosting providers to carry out out-of-court blocking. The relevant amendments to the federal law "On Information, Information Technologies and Information Protection" were adopted by the State Duma on May 27, 2020. Initially, they concerned only the regulation of the distribution of copyrighted content (Article 15.2 of the federal law), but the deputies supplemented the bill by the second reading.
According to the law signed by the President, the mechanism of extrajudicial blocking described in Art. 15.3 of the Federal Law "On Information" (introduced by the so-called Lugovoi law ). This rule provides that Roskomnadzor, at the request of the Prosecutor General's Office, blocks information with calls for mass riots, extremist activities, participation in unauthorized mass events that pose a threat to public safety or public order "inaccurate information", materials of undesirable organizations and links to them . Having received a request from the Prosecutor General's Office, Roskomnadzor instructs telecom operators (Internet providers) to block the site specified in it, and notifies the hoster of the blocking.
The current version of the federal law states that within a day after receiving a notification from Roskomnadzor, the hoster must notify the site owner of the need to delete information. According to the new amendments, the hoster will have to do this immediately, as soon as he receives a notification from Roskomnadzor. If the site owner does not delete the information within 24 hours, then the hoster will have to block the information resource specified in the notification.
Note that, according to the current version of the law, the site owner can delete the information specified in the notification and inform Roskomnadzor about it, after which telecom operators must unblock its resource. The new amendments, although they impose the obligation to block also on the hoster, do not oblige him to unblock the site.
The amendments will come into force on October 1, 2020.
We oppose extrajudicial blocking of materials on the network, as it leads to arbitrariness and abuse by law enforcement agencies. The uncertainty introduced by the new law, which does not describe the procedure for unlocking at the hoster level, is fraught with additional unreasonable restrictions on freedom of speech.
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