Violators of the law on anonymizers will receive fines for administrative offenses – the State Duma adopted a bill on this in the third reading on Tuesday. The text of the document is posted on the State Duma document portal.
The bill prohibits search results for prohibited sites. First of all, search engine operators who have not connected to FSIS (federal state information system, where all the sites banned in Russia are collected). Individuals for non-compliance will be fined 3,000-5,000 rubles, officials - 30,000-50,000 rubles, legal entities - 500,000-700,000 rubles. Search engine operators will receive the same fines if they do not remove prohibited resources from their search results.
According to the law on anonymizers, search engines are required, at the request of Roskomnadzor, to connect to FSIS in order to promptly block prohibited resources. In early May, only Mail.ru and Sputnik were connected to FSIS and successfully filtered traffic, a Roskomnadzor representative told Vedomosti at the time.
Roskomnadzor, according to its representative, is testing the interface of information systems with technical specialists from Google and Yandex. Representatives of Yandex and Google declined to comment. In the first lines of Google and Yandex search results, the Vedomosti correspondent still receives direct links to several resources banned in Russia.
In an interview with RT, the head of Roskomnadzor, Alexander Zharov, promised that search engines would agree to implement the law on anonymizers. According to him, Roskomnadzor worked, among other things, with Yandex, and it was “obvious that browsers will this law observe". “We'll see how Google behaves. This is a foreign company, and they did not participate in the experiment,” Zharov said then.
In more than six months since the law came into force, not a single VPN service or anonymizer has connected to FSIS, a Roskomnadzor representative admitted in May. According to the procedure described in the law, departments involved in operational investigative activities must advise Roskomnadzor which anonymizers and VPN services should be connected to the system. During the entire period of validity of the law, such requests have not yet been received, a representative of Roskomnadzor states.
According to the new law on fines for failure to comply with the law on anonymizers, a hosting provider or other person hosting anonymizers and VPN services on the network, at the request of Roskomnadzor, must promptly provide the agency with information about the owners of these anonymizers and VPN services. Otherwise, they will also be fined: individuals- for 10,000-30,000 rubles, legal - for 50,000-300,000 rubles.
The Federal Law of June 27, 2018 No. 155-FZ “On Amendments to the Code” created a lot of noise online. Russian Federation on administrative violations”, which introduced penalties in the form of a fine for anonymizers and VPNs. Many myths and misconceptions have already appeared around these amendments to the Administrative Code. In this publication, we will tell you whether there is a fine for VPN in Russia for Internet users, and whether there is any punishment for anonymizers on the Runet.
What are anonymizers? Anonymizers can be understood as several types network technologies And software, for example: proxy servers, VPN (Virtual Private Network), Tor (The Onion Router - a proxy server system that allows you to establish anonymous network connection, protected from eavesdropping) and any other services that allow you to bypass blocking access to this or that online content.
Let us recall that back in the summer of 2017, Federal Law No. 276-FZ dated July 29, 2017 “On Amendments to the Federal Law “On Information” was adopted. information technology and on the protection of information,” which prohibited the Owners of anonymizers and VPN services from providing the opportunity to use them in Russia to gain access to blocked sites (sections or certain pages of sites). This “Law on Banning Anonymizers” came into force on November 1, 2017 and obliges the owners of anonymizers (including owners of VPN/proxy services) to block Russian users’ access to resources blacklisted by Roskomnadzor. The same law instructs search engines (Yandex, Poisk.Mail.ru, Sputnik, Google, etc.) to stop displaying links to prohibited sites in their search results.
What fines do the new amendments to the Code of Administrative Offenses introduce?
Since the fall of 2018, the Federal Law of June 27, 2018 No. 155-FZ “On Amendments to the Code of the Russian Federation on Administrative Offenses” came into force, according to which fines were introduced into the Code of Administrative Offenses of the Russian Federation
- penalties for search engines(citizens and legal entities) for displaying in search results upon requests from users of links to prohibited information resources (sites or individual pages of sites) - Article 13.40 of the Code of Administrative Offenses of the Russian Federation;
- fines for hosting companies(citizens and legal entities) for concealing proxy servers running on the facilities of these hosters - Article 19.7 of the Code of Administrative Offenses of the Russian Federation.
According to Federal Law No. 155-FZ of June 27, 2018 maximum fine for violating the “law banning anonymizers” will be 5,000 rubles for citizens, 50,000 rubles for officials, but legal entities may be fined up to 700,000 rubles.
Will regular users be fined for using a VPN?
Let's figure out whether new fines for using anonymizers (VPN, Tor, proxies, etc.) threaten ordinary users in Russia? What happens if an ordinary citizen (VKontakte, Odnoklassniki, Facebook or Twitter) links to VPN or any other anonymizers and proxy services?
No, Ordinary users will not face fines for using anonymizers! You will not be fined for VPN, Tor, or other proxies!
Punishment in the Code of Administrative Offenses of the Russian Federation is provided only for those who directly own VPN services, who support them and ensure the functioning of these anonymizers. Fines, as we wrote above, can also be applied to search engines if they, in turn, do not stop displaying links to sites that provide anonymous access to information resources that are on the Roskomnadzor blacklist, bypassing the blocking.
The user will not be fined for posting links to a proxy server or VPN on his pages on social networks to view prohibited sites. Although in the past there were initiatives to punish Internet users or proxy servers/anonymizers, such ideas did not find support among deputies.
Can anonymizers work in Russia legally?
Yes they can! There is no total ban on anonymizers, and such a service can operate legally in Russia if it fulfills a number of requirements established by the new Federal Law “On Information, Information Technologies and Information Protection.”
In order to function legally, the owners of the anonymizer are required to connect to the Federal State Information System (FSIS), the operator of which is Roskomnadzor. Anonymizer owners can connect to the FSIS RKN independently, or within 30 days after receiving an order from the RKN. After connecting to FSIS, the owners of the anonymizer are required to “ensure compliance with the ban on providing the opportunity to use programs and other products on the territory of the Russian Federation” within 3 days. technical means to gain access to prohibited sites.
“On June 5, the State Duma adopted a law that introduces fines for search engine operators for issuing links to prohibited sites. Earlier, in November 2017, the so-called law on “anonymizers” came into force. Both laws caused a lot of controversy and misunderstanding on the part of Internet users,” the State Duma website reports.
Parliamentarians remind that the Federal Law of July 29, 2017 No. 276-FZ “On Amendments to the Federal Law “On Information, Information Technologies and Information Protection” - the law on “anonymizers” is aimed primarily at owners of resources that provide access to the network Internet with a hidden IP address and other identifying characteristics of the user and search engine operators.
At the request of Roskomndazor, “anonymizers” must connect to the Federal State Information System containing a register of prohibited sites. After which the depersonalizing resource must block access of its users to sites prohibited in the Russian Federation. In case of failure to comply with the requirements of the law, the “anonymizer” resource itself is blocked by Roskomnadzor.
Deputies also report that bill No. 195449-7 “On amendments to the Code of the Russian Federation on Administrative Offenses (in terms of establishing administrative liability for failure to fulfill duties by the operator search engine)", establishes liability for failure to comply with the requirements for blocking the issuance of links to prohibited resources only for search engine operators.
“If the search engine operator (these are operators of robotic search engines, such as, for example, Yandex or Google) has not fulfilled the obligation to connect to the FSIS, and, accordingly, has not stopped issuing links to prohibited sites in the results search queries“This entails the imposition of an administrative fine,” says the official statement of the State Duma.
The fine will be:
From 30 to 50 thousand rubles for officials; From 500 to 700 thousand rubles for legal entities.
It is worth adding that the text of bill No. 195449-7 nevertheless includes the administrative responsibility of citizens, the fine for which ranges from 3 to 5 thousand rubles. However, the article being introduced into the Code of Administrative Offenses regulates only cases of failure to fulfill obligations by the search engine operator. It is not entirely clear in what cases citizens will be held accountable for failure to fulfill their duties by the operator.
On this moment Bill No. 195449-7 passed the third reading in the State Duma. According to RIA Novosti, the Federation Council approved the bill on June 20, 2018. If it successfully passes the upper house of the Russian parliament, the law will be signed by the president. After official publication, the law came into force 90 days later.
