By Natalie Duffy
Roskomnadzor, the Kremlin’sfederal censorship agency, is responsible for regulatingthe Internet in Russia, which includes enforcing police orders and court decisions to ban websites and online services deemed harmful or illicit.
According to figures released in April 2016, Roskomnadzor has blocked more than 25,000 websites, though the actual number of sites affected by these bans is more than 600,000, say activists at RosKomSvoboda, because they share the same IP addresses as sites blacklisted officially.
Today, thenumber of banned websites in Russia is still rising steadily. As 2016 comes to a close, RuNet Echo looks back at the five mostcontroversial, infamous, and even ironic actions this year by Russia’s federal censors.
1. RuTracker.org
On January 25, a city court in Moscowordered RuTracker.org, the biggest torrent tracker (enablingpeer-to-peer file sharing), to beblocked in Russia permanently. RuTracker.org had an average monthly visitor count of 70 million individuals, not only from Russia, but across the former USSR and abroad. The original lawsuitwas filed by one of the largest publishing houses in Russia, Eksmo, andSBA Production,a subsidiary of Warner Music Russia, which is owned by Warner Music Group,one of the fiercest promoters of copyright protections in the world.
The verdict illustrateda push by the Russian authorities to crack down on piracywhatever the location of the copyright owners.When RuTracker.org learned of its imminent blacklisting, itbegan an education campaign to teach its users how to bypass the Russian regulators byusing VPNs, proxy servers, and the Tor Network.
2. Comodo
Roskomnadzors blacklist campaign took an ironic turn in July, when the agency briefly blocked Comodo, which was one of thousands of websites listed ina court ruling detailing a massive number of sites to be blocked.
The company is one of the world’s largest providers of SSL certificates, atechnical tool that many websites use in order to provide themselves and their users with an extra layer of reassurance that their traffic is actually being sent to and from the site they think they’re interacting with.In fact, Comodo is so large that it is Roskomnadzors very own SSL-certificate provider.
By blocking Comodo, the watchdogs site was rendered inaccessible, as well as were several other Russian government websites. Comodo was quickly removed from the federal blacklist following the realization of the gaffe, though Russian regulators revealed that enforcing sweeping court rulings sometimes means they are unable to review the very websites they are charged with blocking.
3. PornHub
On September 13, PornHub was blocked acrossRussia. Referring to the federal law that Roskomnadzor used as a basis for this censorship, a legal analyst for the news websiteGazeta.rustated that there is no legal prohibition of pornography in general. Roskomnadzor latercountered that any distribution of pornography on the Internetis illegal because it allows minors to have access to these materials.
In a further justification of the move against PornHub, Roskomnadzor encouragedthe site’s fans to meet with each other in real life.
In a humourous twist, PornHub thentweeted at Roskomnadzor, offering the agencya premium account, free of charge.
Sadly for the website, and for consumers of pornography across Russia, the propositionwas promptly rejected.
4. LinkedIn
LinkedIn or BlockedIn | Photo Courtesy : My Social Game PlanIn one of the most notable blacklist additions in2016, Moscows Tagansky Court approved Roskomnadzors request to add professional networking site LinkedIn to Russia’s federalblacklist in August. The courts ruled to uphold this decision, effectively blocking LinkedIn insideRussia on November 17.
There are numerous theories aboutwhy Russian state censors targeted LinkedIn. Roskomnadzor cited security concerns, pointing to a major cyberattack on the service in 2012, in which millions of passwords and and other account information was stolen.
[su_pullquote align=”right”]In other words, state officials know they could ban LinkedIn without provoking the outcry that might follow from a similar action against, say, WhatsApp. [/su_pullquote]Critics, however, say the crackdown on LinkedIn was a sort of trial balloon, and the service was selected because of its second-tier status in Russia, where the platform has never been extremely popular. In other words, state officials know they could ban LinkedIn without provoking the outcry that might follow from a similar action against, say, WhatsApp.
Analysts say Roskomnadzor hoped to intimidate larger social-media networks into cooperating with the Russian government particularly a widely flouted 2014 law requiring online services to store user data on servers physically located inside Russia.
5. Google News
Latest news banned | Photo Courtesy: Artificial BrainsOn December 5, Roskomnadzor spokesman Vadim Ampelonsky announced that news aggregation sites owned by foreign companies whose traffic is greater that 1 million visitors per day will have three months to register their legal entities within Russia and will be placed on a special register.
The sites which would include Bing.com and, most notably, Google News under google.com will have from January 1, 2017, until the end of March 2017 tochange their registration data or set up subsidiaries in Russia. If they do not comply by that date, they risk, like so many websites before them, being placed on the government’s infamous blacklist.
The articlewas originally published onGlobalVoices
Featured Image Source:The Guindy Times
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