Roskomnadzor banned search engines from finding sites of the largest foreign hosting companies

Roskomnadzor announced that it was expanding the “coercive measures” it introduced in September against a number of foreign hosting providers for their refusal to open representative offices in the country. We are talking about 12 large hosters, including Amazon Web Services, GoDaddy and Hetzner. By message services, a “ban on search results for information about the websites of these companies” has been introduced against them. This is the first time in Russia that the law on the “landing” of Internet companies introduces a ban on search results.

“Coercive measures” are selected at the discretion of Roskomnadzor from among those prescribed in the law on “landing” (No. 236-FZ of July 1, 2021) – up to blocking the site and prohibiting payments to companies. After the outbreak of Russian military operations in Ukraine, certain measures were introduced against many large foreign companies and organizations: Google, the Wikimedia Foundation (ensures the operation of Wikipedia), Twitch, Telegram, Zoom, etc. The reason for them was refusal to delete information declared prohibited in the Russian Federation. In most cases, we are talking about the obligation for search engines to mark the sites of the mentioned companies as “violators of the law of the Russian Federation,” but in the case of Google there was also introduced ban on advertising of its services.

In terms of marking sites of “violators”, Roskomnadzor’s requirements are fulfilled only by Yandex and Mail.ru, which uses its own search engine. Google does not label sites. At the time of publication, the websites of the affected companies remained both in the main search results and in the information block (displayed on the side or top of the search results).

On December 1, amendments to the laws “On Communications” and “On Information” come into force in Russia, introducing additional requirements for hosting providers operating in Russia. In particular, they must be included in a special register compiled by Roskomnadzor, as well as to identify their clients through payment, telephone number or documents provided in person.

More details about “down-to-earth” hosters can be found in the Kommersant article. “Roskomnadzor has counted to twelve”.

Yuri Litvinenko