In what is being touted as a crackdown on cyber-extremism and banned information that may be harmful to children, the Russian government has opened a portal listing outlawed websites. The portal, which has been dubbed the Unified Register, will be temporarily run by the Federal Service for Supervision in the Sphere of Telecom, Information Technologies and Mass Communications (Roskomnadzor).
The site, however, came under attack yesterday shortly after it went on line. “There are attacks. We are retaliating successfully,” Roskomnadzor posted in its Twitter account.
Part of the Unified Register website is open to the general public, so they can view the names of perpetrators and find out why they have been blacklisted. Telecom operators will have unrestricted access to the resource and are expected to deal with owners of websites that post outlawed content immediately upon receipt of Roskomnadzor’s notifications. The websites will then have 24 hours to remove the undesirable content.
“Imprecise language and vague definitions”
The Register comes as part of the new legislation on harmful Internet content which was adopted by the Russian parliament earlier this year and came into force on Nov. 1.
The authorities refused to review the most controversial amendments, ignoring a flurry of criticism from Internet companies and free-speech advocates.
Reporters Without Borders condemned the law. “We are forced to conclude that no political will exists to resolve the law’s contradictions and to eliminate those that pose threats to freedom,” the NGO said in a statement.
“Taken as a whole, the latest legislative initiatives in the Duma have all the appearance of a concerted attack on freedom to disseminate information,” Reporters Without Borders believes.
“In each of these bills, imprecise language and vague definitions are far too open to interpretation. We call on members of parliament to revise their proposals in light of the fundamental right to freedom of information.”
As the government blacklists banned content, researchers from Perm State University, in the West Urals, are also offering their own innovative software filter that enables social network users and bloggers to cut off outlawed content on their own.
Update November 28, 2012
Web pages related to major international websites, including Google’s YouTube and Blogspot.ru, temporarily appeared on the list of banned websites, sometimes due to technical mistakes.
Access to YouTube, which hosts the controversial video ‘Innocence of Muslims,’ has been blocked by Internet providers of several regions of the North Caucasus.
Meanwhile, the Supreme Court ruled that Internet providers risk loosing their licenses if they fail to block access to sites with illegal content, The Moscow Times reported. It is unlawful not only to disseminate information restricted by law, the court said, but also to provide access to this information.
A censorship monitoring website, Agentura.ru lists numerous instances of court-ordered blocks and deletions in recent months. The site offers an English-language version.
