The Roskomnadzor registry of prohibited sites has stopped updating

Roskomnadzor has stopped updating the download of the register of prohibited sites. Before this, the agency blocked an average of about 800 addresses every day. From the upload data, telecom operators receive information about resources that need to be blocked, and search engines remove information about them from the search results. Market participants believe that blocking is now carried out directly through equipment on communication networks. However, this is a non-public process, which makes it difficult to challenge blocking in court and eliminate violations.

The data in the download of the register of prohibited sites of Roskomnadzor has not been updated for ten days, Kommersant discovered. This fact was confirmed by two sources in the telecommunications market. By uploading the registry, telecom operators automatically receive information about the resources that need to be blocked. Also, based on this data, search engines remove sites from search results. On average, over the past six months, Roskomnadzor has added about 800 resources to the register for blocking every day. The latest entries are dated March 4; the next day, the department excluded two resources from the register. Kommersant did not find any new entries in the registry upload at the time of publication.

VimpelCom, MTS, Tele2 declined to comment. MegaFon told Kommersant that they comply with “the requirements of Russian legislation and block access to all resources located in the Unified Register of Prohibited Sites.” “According to the legislation of the Russian Federation, search engines are required to exclude links to sites and their “mirrors” as soon as Roskomnadzor enters them into the register. Synchronization with the registry occurs automatically. The procedure has not changed recently,” the Yandex press service explained to Kommersant. Roskomnadzor did not respond to Kommersant’s request.

The lack of updates in the registry download does not mean that blocking does not occur. On March 11, the Main Radio Frequency Center, subordinate to Roskomnadzor, published a message on its website that from March 4 to March 10, 576 phishing resources were blocked. The publication does not specify how access to the sites was limited.

DBA and Partners lawyer Ekaterina Abashina clarifies that blocking an Internet resource can be done either by entering it into a unified register, or using TSPU equipment, which is installed on operator networks and is used to restrict access under the law “on the sovereign RuNet”: “ An important difference between register blocking is its publicity: you can find out who, when and sometimes for what reasons made the decision to block, and it can be challenged in court on its merits. With TSPU, even the telecom operators themselves do not know the details.”

But if the registry is not updated, sites that are blocked through TSPU may appear in search results, notes SmartSEO director Sergei Koshkin. “In addition, problems may arise for legitimate sites that have been blocked, for example, due to hacking and virus infection. They took action, fixed the problems, but due to the lack of registry updates, they cannot appear in the search results again.” The expert adds that if a site is unavailable, its traffic decreases, which lowers its position in search results.

A Kommersant source in the market believes that the register has stopped being updated in anticipation of possible cyber attacks on the days of the presidential elections in the Russian Federation: “The authorities are preparing for provocations, but want to fight them non-publicly so that no questions arise. TSPU were originally needed so that Roskomnadzor could block what it considered necessary without operators. I suspect that registry locks will become a thing of the past, since TSPU is more efficient.”

Roskomnadzor is moving from blocking by the registry and by the operators themselves to blocking by its own forces and means through the TSPU, agrees Dmitry Petrov, general director of the communications operator Comfortel. He considers the trend positive for operators, because the mechanism eliminates the risk of unreasonable fines for incorrect implementation of filtration requirements: “If filtration is a state function, then the state should do this on its equipment, which it controls.”

Alexey Zhabin