Russia has quickly grown to be a world ruler when it gets to website banning. Tens of thousands of websites are obstructed in the nation on copyright violation and a wide variety of other areas.
However, as is usually the case, not all residents voluntarily subordinate themselves to these type of limitations. On the contrary, various people use proxies or anonymizing apps such as VPNs and TOR to gain access.
In recent periods, the Russian Administration has acted on a bill to crack down on those circumvention means as well, and political media report that President Vladimir Putin has immediately signed the submitted bill into law.
Under the new law, regional telecoms watchdog Rozcomnadzor will hold a list of forbidden domains while recognizing sites, services, and software that give access to them. Rozcomnadzor will then try to communicate the operatives of the services, asking them to ban the blocked websites or face the same fate.
The FSB and the Department of Internal Affairs will be tasked with monitoring attacks, which they will later point to the telecoms.
In extension to targeting the circumvention sites, apps, and their hosts, the bill targets search engines as well.
Search engines will be asked to remove links to obstructed resources of their results, as those would encourage individuals to obtain prohibited material. Search engines that disappoint to comply with the new conditions face a $12,400 penalty per violation.
Local search giant Yandex earlier spoke out upon the far-reaching claims, calling them as unnecessary.
“We think that the set of constraints on search engines is unnecessary,” a Yandex spokesperson said.
“Even if the evidence to a banned source does look in search results, it does not indicate that by agreeing to the user will get access, if it was previously blocked by ISPs or in any other ways,” the company added.
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