Translated material
"A completely new page in the history of Runet"
Roskomnadzor said that Twitter is slowing down, since since 2017 the social network has not deleted content that persuading children to suicide, containing child pornography and drug information. This measure was applied for the first time. The department threatened to tighten the punishment if Twitter ignores the requirements.
“Paper” spoke with the head of legal practice of the public project “Roskomsvobod” by Sarkis Darbinyan that these measures are mean for the Russian Internet.
- What Roskomnadzor does is completely illegal from a legal point of view, since the slowdown of traffic is not provided for by the current norm of the federal law , according to which Twitter received a demand. The so-called partial restrictions are possible according to the recently adopted " Law on the prohibition of censorship by Internet portals ." However, Roskomnadzor did not present any demands on it.
As for the technical capabilities, we understand that, within the framework of the Law on the “sovereign Internet ”, equipment put equipment on the nodes of all mobile operators that allows you to control the speed of traffic and manage it.
It is quite strange that the largest failure in the work of sites of state structures coincided with the day of the first application of the Law on the “sovereign Internet” and the innovative methodology of blocking, which we had not yet seen before. Let me remind you that according to the law on the “sovereign Internet”, everything is blocked from a single center, and not as before - by the hands of communication operators. Setting these networks from Roskomnadzor and an attempt to block Twitter - links of one chain.
This is a completely new page in the history of Runet. I think Twitter was chosen as the first goal, because it is less popular than other services. Apparently, in the near future, Facebook may join Twitter, after which the Russian authorities will test the technology of blocking according to the new law and sooner or later they will move to other giants. And perhaps this is an act of power, which, in fact, is a signal for foreign services: either to obey the Russian law or expect a total lock.
From a technical point of view, Twitter is much easier to block - there is a fairly lightweight content. Twitter users will feel less slowdown than users, for example, Tiktoka. For this platform, any slowdown in death is like, in fact, this means the complete destruction of the service in Russia.
I think that the authorities do not expect the outflow of Twitter users. This is an experiment in the framework of the new law, a new system that was built. And this is the development of scenarios that can be applied in the future.
It has long been clear where Runet was going: a course was chosen to sovereign the Internet, to create their own rules of the game and subordinate foreign companies to these rules in order to control the information space. The strengthening of this happened 10 years ago, just after a series of civil protests. The desire to take control of the information space completely falls into the trends of the current Russian government.
There are good news: while there are tools for counteraction-first of all, these are VPN services that allow you to bypass blocking and slowdown. The next step is an attempt to block them. I remind you that the law on blocking such services was adopted , but it was considered dead, because there was no technical possibility of blocking. But it seems to me that a new pursuit of such services will begin now.
The second good news is that there is an Esni protocol. It has not yet been introduced so widely, but if the largest browsers and Internet services will install the default protocol, then this will make all the actions of Roskomnadzor absolutely useless. The Internet community is slowly going to this and, most likely, in the near future it will be introduced everywhere.
FZ-149, Art. 15. Part 1. The Law on Information, Information Technologies and Information Protection. Regulates the right to search, receive, transmit, production and distribution of information, use information technologies and information protection.
The law gives Roskomnadzor the right to block Internet sites or individual pages if they limit socially significant information in Russia. Twitter, Facebook and YouTube can fall under the law, as they are mentioned in an explanatory note.
We are talking about fines for search engines for issuing links to proxy services and the RKN requirement to ensure that VPN services and search engines connect to the state system and quickly block access to prohibited sites.
Protocol using cryptographic algorithms and encryption methods. Mincifers admit that the use of such protocols reduces the ability of the Russian authorities to block undesirable content.
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