Roskomnadzor demanded that Google remove all “prohibited content” in a day and threatened to slow down traffic

Roskomnadzor demanded that Google remove all “prohibited content” within a day and threatened to slow down traffic to the company’s services. this TASS reports with reference to a press release from the supervisory agency.

In their search engine, between 20 and 30% of links to “prohibited content” remain, and on the company’s YouTube video hosting site there are 5 thousand videos, including 3.5 thousand with “calls to extremism.”

If the company does not remove the controversial content within 24 hours, the department promised to draw up a protocol against them under Article 13.41 of the Code of Administrative Offenses, repeated violation of which entails a fine of up to 10% of annual revenue. “Roskomnadzor does not rule out a slowdown in the traffic of the company’s services in Russia,” the agency quoted them as saying.

Roskomnadzor previously filed reports against Google three times for selectively removing links to prohibited sites from search results; the courts imposed fines on them from 700 thousand to 3 million rubles in December 2020 (Article 13.40 of the Administrative Code).

On May 24 , it became known that the company challenged in court Roskomnadzor’s demand to remove 12 videos from YouTube with calls to participate in the January rallies in support of oppositionist Alexei Navalny.

In March, Roskomnadzor, due to complaints about insufficient filtering on Twitter, began to slow down the transfer of photos and videos to the social network. After negotiations management, with Twitter the department left the traffic slowdown only on smartphones and threatened similar restrictions on YouTube and Facebook .

“After Twitter , at the request of Roskomnadzor, deleted 91% of prohibited information, Google came out on top in terms of the amount of illegal content that was not removed,” the Roskomnadzor press service said.