The head of the Duma Committee on the information policy Alexander Khinshtein and his Deputy Sergei Boyarsky introduced a bill on fines of up to RUB 15 million for site owners, not remove information the dissemination of which is prohibited in Russia. In support of the initiative, the authors refer to the refusal of YouTube, Facebook and Twitter to remove such information contrary to the requirements of Roskomnadzor.A bill introduced in the state Duma on July 16, Alexander Khinshtein and Sergei Boyarsky, proposes to Supplement the Code of administrative offences (Cao) a new article under which providers and site owners will receive fines if you do not restrict access to prohibited or unlawful information or remove it. In this case, for legal entities the amount of the fine will be 800 thousand rubles to 4 million rubles, and at repeated violation — from 4 million to 8 million rubles. the Hosting providers, owners of information resources on the Internet are required to restrict access or to delete prohibited or otherwise improper information on the Internet, however, for failure to comply with these requirements any liability for them is not provided, explain the authors. Thus, as of April 2020, nearly 20 thousand facts not prohibited to spread the information, deputies noted, citing data from Roskomnadzor. In particular, to the APR YouTube deleted more than 10 thousand references to such information on Twitter and Instagram — more than 1 thousand of links and Facebook — 362 links, they are listed in the explanatory note. Previously, foreign social networks have already faced multimillion-dollar fines. In February, Twitter and Facebook was fined 4 million rubles each for refusing to move to Russia servers with the data of Russian users. This rule was introduced in the administrative code in December of last year. Before the social network was fined 3 thousand rubles each only for refusing to provide information about the localization data of the Russians. Twitter tried to appeal the punishment to the Supreme court, but did not succeed.The discussion of this measure began in November 2018, reminiscent of the leading analyst of the Russian Association of electronic communications Karen Ghazaryan. The question is, how significant are all these fines for major international social networks and how to recover these funds, he said. “But, in my opinion, for “Yandex” and Mail.ru Group such actions could become a headache,” concludes the analyst.”That is, it can be not only social networks themselves, but also their users, as well as brought for the administration of company websites. This practice can lead to abuse,” he warns. A real alternative to the fines he calls slowing access to foreign pages on the services or impact on them through the payment agents.One of the bills Mr. boyar regarding the rigid regulatory��AI social networks previously “stuck” in the state Duma, and now it’s his new approach has already been paired with a new head of the profile Committee Mr. Khinshtein, says the head of the “Roskomsnab” Artem Kozlyuk. “This project is, unfortunately, a high chance of acceptance, and the original large fines — most likely a bargaining chip with the industry to make them more compliant under the law”— he argues. According to Artem Kozluca, the concept of extremism has a very broad interpretation of the state performers, and the introduction of such penalties in the current political climate — “an exorbitant tax on free speech”.Dmitry Shestoperov
