Earlier this week Roskomnadzor, the Russian telecom and Internet regulator, added Amazon’s cloud storage domain (s3.amazonaws.com) to the register of prohibited sites, before cancelling this access restriction.
The web address was included into the register on June 21, although the Tax Service had already ordered to do so in May. According to Russian tech blog Habrahabr, the s3.amazonaws.com domain had been blocked on TTK and Akado, two important providers.
The reason for the ban of the site lies in that it hosts a webpage allowing users to download a poker-game program. By Russian law, playing poker online is forbidden.
Roskomnadzor spokesman Vadim Ampelonsky told Izvestia, an influential Russian daily, that the agency had notified Amazon about the issue, but the company did not undertake anything.
But as early as June 23, Roskomnadzor agreed to remove Amazon Cloud Drive from its list of banned websites.
It is not the first time that Roskomnadzor blocks important Internet services. In August last year, for example, the regulator blocked a Wikipedia article about charas, a form of hashish. A local court in the southern region of Astrakhan had declared that the article violated the Russian law that forbids dissemination of information on how to make, buy or use drugs. But Roskomnadzor lifted the access restriction as the measure had provoked outrage among the Internet community.
Modest fines for disobeying the regulator
Meanwhile, the government introduced a draft bill to the State Duma that would make it an administrative offense for Internet service providers (ISPs) to connect customers to banned websites, setting fines of up to 100,000 rubles for legal entities (approximately $1,500 at the current exchange rate). Violations would be determined by Russian courts, the draft legislation proposes, as reported by legal information portal Garant and online publication Meduza.
Currently, Russia prohibits access to several kinds of information online, including information about how to prepare and consume illegal drugs, methods of suicide, child pornography, extremism, certain types of hate speech, justifications of terrorism, incitements to participate in unlawful assemblies, and more.
Russia’s current Internet regulations does not establish specific fines for noncompliance with Roskomnadzor’s blocklist. As a result, police have utilized an older administrative code on license violations, when confronting ISPs that continue to connect customers to banned websites. That administrative code allows fines of up to 40,000 rubles (approximately $615), which the government now says is insufficient.
In 2015, there were 501 reported cases of noncompliance by Internet providers with Roskomnadzor’s blocklist. In 488 of those cases, courts levied administrative fines, according to Garant.
