Roskomnadzor asks for VPN services and anonymizers to block prohibited content news

Head of VPN service HideMe.ru Markus Saar recently told that Roskomnadzor is now trying to negotiate with VPN and anonymizers about blocking the banned In RF content. The HideMe site was blocked almost six months ago, Vedomosti writes. Despite the fact that the violation, because of which the lock was made, the service employees were eliminated almost immediately, Roskomnadzor did not hurry with the removal of the block. Instead, the agency tried to get Saar to restrict access to resources, which Roscommon oversight included in the block list.

Employees of the department, in particular, sent a letter to the head of HideMe, where they asked about the technical possibility of restricting access to resources made by the agency on the list of banned sites. According to Saar, such a request is not within the competence of the regulator, therefore this appeal was regarded as an attempt of pressure, the request of Roskomnadzor service was not fulfilled.

But the anonymizer Cameleo agreed to cooperate with Roskomnadzor. This site wanted to place its advertising service HideMe, but Roskomnadzor asked to remove advertising from the management of Cameleo.

Vadim Ampelonsky, representative of Roskomnadzor, says that anonymizers are banned in the Russian Federation, as described in court decisions. The reason for blocking is the ability to use this service to gain access to a site blocked in Russia. If the anonymizer provides an opportunity to bypass the lock, it is blocked. If such a resource works according to the laws of the Russian Federation, the block is removed.

Artem Kozlyuk, the head of the “Roskomvoboda”, recalls that Roskomnadzor has the authority to independently decide on the exclusion of the Internet resource from the register of prohibited sites. So, if the anonymizer removes the content prohibited by the court, the lock is removed. In some cases, the controller allows the owner of the blocked site to challenge the decision in higher courts.

Vadim Ampelonsky argues that in order to interact with anonymizers, separate regulation is necessary. At the same time, back in 2016, he said that Roskomnadzor, in general, calmly refers to such tools to bypass locks, such as proxy servers, anonymizers, VPN. According to him, it is not against the law to use them.

But the rights holders consider otherwise. In the same year 2016, the head of the National Federation of the Music Industry Leonid Agronov said that bypassing the blocking of resources banned in Russia is dangerous. The main threat is the opportunity to come across the propaganda of drugs, terrorism, etc.