Roskomnadzor ordered the development of a system for automatically checking the quality of VPN services and search engines - the regulator is interested in whether they are good at blocking banned sites. Experts don't believe in the effectiveness of such a system
Roskomnadzor's subordinate Federal State Unitary Enterprise “Main Radio Frequency Center” (GRCHTs) ordered the development of an automated system that will control whether sites prohibited in Russia are blocked by search engines, virtual private networks (VPNs), proxy servers and anonymizers. This follows from the materials posted on the website zakupki.gov.ru. The initial cost of the contract is 25 million rubles. The results of the competition should be announced on April 8, the system should be created by December of this year.
The text of the purchase notes that the system will reduce the current costs of the HRChTS for round-the-clock monitoring of search engine and VPN operators, reducing the time and labor costs of employees. In terms of the degree of scientific and technical novelty, the created system will not be fundamentally new either from a design or from a technological point of view, but it has no known existing analogues, the document says.
RBC figured out whether such a system was needed and whether it would be better than people to monitor the blocking of sites banned in Russia.
How the current blocking scheme works
Since November 2017, in accordance with the law "On Information, Information Technologies and Information Protection", VPN services and anonymizers are obliged to restrict users' access to websites prohibited in Russia. But this requirement applies only to those services that received a corresponding notification from Roskomnadzor and connected to the Federal State Information System (FSIS; it contains information about prohibited sites). But the service cannot independently turn to VPN services - it can initiate a connection only on the basis of an appeal to it from the Federal Security Service (FSB) or another body carrying out operational-search activities. If the anonymizer still does not connect to the FSIS within 30 days from the receipt of the request from Roskomnadzor, then it will be blocked by itself. Only some anonymizers with Russian roots, such as 2ip and Chameleon, have publicly announced their readiness to comply with this law, most foreign services have stated that such a requirement will be ignored.
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In February 2018, a representative of Roskomnadzor told RBC that at that time they had not received a single appeal from the bodies of operational-investigative activities and state security regarding anonymizers and VPN services. Whether there have been such appeals so far, the representative of Roskomnadzor did not specify, but said that currently there is not a single entry in the register of anonymizers and VPN.
But in addition to VPN services, the 2017 amendments also affected search engines. They also, at the request of Roskomnadzor, must connect to the FSIS and ensure the blocking of sites. Mail. Ru Group, Yandex and the search engine Sputnik developed by Rostelecom were connected to the system. But the demand was ignored by Google for a long time. As a result, in December 2018, Roskomnadzor fined the company for this. In particular, the authorities demanded that Google exclude information about suicide and drugs, extremism and terrorism, as well as child pornography and gambling. In February 2019, the company paid a fine in the amount of RUB 500 thousand. and soon began to block about 70% of links to prohibited resources. The representative of Roskomnadzor then stated that the department "had established a constructive dialogue with Google," but whether the company had joined the FSIS, he did not specify.
How the control process will change
Now, to check how conscientiously a particular service or search engine complies with the requirements of the law, an appropriate task is required from Roskomnadzor. After that, the HRChTs employee manually checks whether the search engine or VPN gives out resources prohibited in Russia, and writes a report, which he sends to Roskomnadzor. With the introduction of the system, the check will be carried out automatically, but also on the instructions of the service.
As Mikhail Klimarev, executive director of the Society for the Protection of the Internet, explained, most VPN services, especially Western ones, refused to block content banned in Russia, as this would make the VPN's raison d'être. At the same time, manually identifying violators is a very difficult task. Search engines, according to him, have a complex technical device - they have learned for years to give out the necessary links by keywords. “In fact, it is required to complete the task opposite to the search engine - using a known link, you need to identify the keywords for which this link is issued,” he said. Representatives of Yandex and Google declined to comment.
Will the system work
Maxim Ryabyko, general director of the Association for the Protection of Copyright on the Internet, believes that the effectiveness of the system will depend on its configuration: as long as checks are pinpoint, at the request of the head of Roskomnadzor, as required by the current procedure, even an automated check will be ineffective. “But if the system automatically checks search results for words such as 'root tracker' or 'drugs', and when it detects violations, it may be a good help for the regulator,” he said.
As Karen Ghazaryan, chief analyst of the Russian Association of Electronic Commerce, explained to RBC, initially, within the framework of the law "On Information …" there were no means of its implementation. “Now search engines receive the same unloading of prohibited resources that cellular operators also receive - it is technically not designed for automated processing, therefore, it has to be manually optimized to further restrict access,” he said. In his opinion, it is not a very difficult task to write software that would automatically block websites, but you still have to manually recycle the list that search engines and VPN services receive from Roskomnadzor. “The system could be made even cheaper than for 25 million rubles, but a more rational solution would be to keep the register correctly,” he said. As the representative of Roskomnadzor notes in turn, the new system will allow search engines, VPNs and anonymizers to receive an up-to-date list of prohibited resources in the form in which they can process it.
An official representative of Rocket VPN told RBC that Roskomnadzor did not contact the company with the requirement to connect to the registry and block websites prohibited in Russia. “Probably because our main promoted version of the site is English. If they contact us, we will most likely fulfill their requirements, but this will only apply to servers located in Russia,”says a representative of Rocket VPN. In his opinion, the monitoring system created by Roskomnadzor is unlikely to work successfully. “VPN providers do not have permanent servers, they change, add, and remove all the time. How will they keep track of all this? Will they monitor every server all the time? It doesn't work that way. For example, it is believed that China has a very cool VPN monitoring and blocking system, but it can be bypassed in 5 minutes if you knowwhere to press, and if you don't know, follow the instructions in 10 minutes. They definitely cannot do better in Russia,”he said.
