Roskomnadzor to Get Right to Block Websites with Instructions to Bypass Blocks

The Russian Ministry of Digital Development has published a draft resolution allowing Roskomnadzor to block resources with information on how to bypass blocking in Russia.

The agency proposes to expand the criteria on the basis of which RKN restricts access to websites and to allow blocking of resources containing “information on methods and techniques for ensuring access to information resources and (or) information and telecommunications networks, access to which is restricted on the territory of the Russian Federation.”

Public discussion of the initiative will take place on the portal of draft legal acts until September 15.

The State Duma supports this idea, but at the same time claims that they do not plan to introduce punishment for using VPN.

"There are a lot of different tricks, VPN services have already been blocked, the systemic fight will continue. All possible tools must be used, and we see how much, if not catastrophically, traffic on banned social networks has fallen and how successfully our social networks are developing," Andrey Svintsov, deputy head of the committee on information policy, information technology and communications, told the Pod'em publication.

• Against the backdrop of the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the tightening of military censorship, Roskomnadzor began to massively block resources that, according to the Prosecutor General's Office of the Russian Federation, disseminate unreliable (i.e., different from the position of the Russian Ministry of Defense) information about the war in Ukraine. At the beginning of the summer, Roskomnadzor reported that since February 24, 2022, it had blocked 206 thousand resources with "fakes" about the SVO , "discrediting" the Russian army and calls for unauthorized actions.