The proposal is politically harmful and not technically feasible, they say.
A group of senators led by the chairman of the constitutional committee Andrei Klishas (one of the initiators of the law on the "sovereign Internet") on Tuesday submitted to the State Duma a bill to block e-mail users and instant messengers for disseminating prohibited information. Currently, only the services themselves can block user accounts for violating community rules.
In 2019, the distribution of deliberately false threats of terrorist attacks by e-mail became widespread, the authors remind in the explanatory note, so blocking individual messages from attackers is ineffective. Therefore, they insist that postal services and instant messengers block exactly accounts within 24 hours after receiving the request of Roskomnadzor. After that, the user will not be able to send messages, and whether he will receive them will be determined by the government, which should develop a blocking procedure, explains the co-author of the amendments, Lyudmila Bokova. Authorized bodies will learn about the distribution of prohibited information from complaints from citizens, she insists: "The operators of postal services and messengers themselves will not read the correspondence."
This is the second version of the project on blocking users: the July version also implied mandatory identification of mail users through mobile phone numbers, but the authors abandoned this norm. A similar requirement was introduced in the spring for instant messengers, but, as employees of telecom operators explained to Vedomosti, it actually does not work.
Since 2018, messengers operating in Russia are already obliged to block, at the request of Roskomnadzor, individual messages with prohibited information, insults to the authorities and fake news. Formally, this applies only to those resources that are registered in the register of information dissemination organizers from Roskomnadzor. But such large messengers as WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger and Viber still do not appear on it, and Telegram is completely blocked in Russia. Nothing is known about cases of requests to block such messages by officials - there is no such information in Roskomnadzor's registers. A representative of the department declined to answer the question whether it sent requests to the owners of instant messengers to block messages.
The representative of the Ministry of Telecom and Mass Communications declined to comment. A person in the internal political bloc of the Kremlin calls the bill an initiative of the senators: "It has not been agreed with us, we have not seen it."
Representatives of Facebook (also run by WhatsApp), Google and Mail.ru Group did not respond to requests from Vedomosti. A Yandex representative declined to comment.
Experts and officials interviewed by Vedomosti criticized the amendments. It is dangerous to introduce laws that discredit power in the eyes of citizens and, moreover, are technically unrealizable, says a person at the Ministry of Telecom and Mass Communications: “The experience of blocking Telegram has taught some people nothing.” Foreign resources are unlikely to comply with the requirements of the Russian authorities to block users, another relevant official said: “And then what? We really don't know how to block the services themselves. What is the point of blocking an account, if you can immediately create dozens of new ones, Karen Kazaryan, an analyst with the Russian Association for Electronic Communications, wonders.
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The Internet in Russia was originally a territory of freedom, and the authorities were calm about this, because the TV controlled by them was considered the main thing, reminds political analyst Alexei Makarkin. But young Russians rarely turn on TV, the political significance of the Internet has grown and now the "Chinese wall" has begun to be created on the fly, the expert says.
When the state introduces bans, it does not care too much about how exactly they will be implemented, political analyst Abbas Gallyamov notes: "As long as the country has a suitable political atmosphere, then iron must be forged, there is no time to understand the nuances." The political situation now is not very favorable for the authorities and the stake on the administrative regulation of the political process is, in fact, the only possible one, the expert believes: "It is no longer possible to count on the loyalty of the voter, all that remains is to crush him with the help of repressive mechanisms."
Authors: Ksenia Boletskaya, Ekaterina Bryzgalova, Svetlana Bocharova
