Russian Internet Restriction Bill

Russian Internet restriction bill (Russian: закон о блокировке экстремистских сайтов; Federal law of Russian Federation no. 139-FZ of 2012-07-28) is a law passed by the Russian State Duma in 2012 which replaced the procedure of shutting down telecom operators by prosecutors' orders with a blacklist of Internet sites containing alleged child pornography, drug-related material, extremist material, and other content illegal in Russia. This blacklist was supposed to be implemented and supervised by a self-regulating NGO of Internet users, but it was never created and this duty was assumed by government agency Roskomnadzor. The bill also introduced several other changes in the law, including liability for providers of telecom services for failing to protect children. Some critics expressed concern that the bill could be used to censor the Internet. Others noted that it would be expensive and, as written, contained many technical problems that would negatively impact legitimate Internet use.

According to the news agency RIA Novosti, Russia's League for Internet Safety (Russian: Лига безопасного интернета) pushed for the bill, after claiming to have broken up an Internet-based pedophile ring. Retired Communications and Mass Media Minister Igor Shchyogolev heads the group's board of trustees.

The bill no. 89417-6 was introduced in the Duma on June 7, 2012; it was given first reading on July 6 and both second and third readings on July 11. On July 18, 2012, the law was approved by the Federation Council.

The bill passed unanimously by the Russian Duma, with support of all four parties. Two lawmakers are publicly known for an active support of the Internet censorship bill: Ilya Ponomarev and Yelena Mizulina.

On the day of second reading, the Russian Wikipedia staged a protest by shutting down its site.

The Blacklist or Registry is created by amending the Federal Law of July 27, 2006 No. 149-FZ "On Information, Information Technologies and Information Protection." The bill would add a new Article 15: "Uniform registry of domain names and (or) the universal locators to pages of sites on the Internet and network addresses of sites on the Internet that contain information prohibited to spread in the Russian Federation." It would create a registry of domain names with the URLs and network addresses of web pages that contain illegal information. The jurisdiction of the proposed registry would be under a Russian non-profit organization.

The mentioned identifiers of websites would be included into the Registry based on:

When a site is added to the registry, the web hosting provider must within days inform the owner about the situation and the need for removal of content. The site owner must, within days of the receipt of the notification from the hosting provider, remove the page or pages with the offending content. If the site owner fails to do so, the hosting provider is obliged to restrict Internet access to the site.