83,000 'Unlawful’ Website Blacklistings Reported in Russia

In the year since an Internet blacklist was activated by Russia’s communication watchdog Roskomnadzor, more than 83,000 websites have been blocked without appropriate legal justification, head of the ‘RosKomSvoboda” NGO Artyom Kozlyuk. The Internet-freedom NGO head says that the unlawful blocks made up 98% all of sites blacklisted since the registry’s activation. The cause for blocking resources that were not in violation of the law was their sharing of the same net addresses as the banned sites. The NGO reports that the blocking reached its peak in October : 320 IP addresses were added to the blacklist, which hosted 35.5 thousand domains. The deputy head of the telecommunications ministry earlier told Digit.ru that the law abiding owners of internet portals shouldn’t use shared IP addresses. “Buy your own IP address, and there’s no reason to worry. Or, if you decided to use a shared IP – check who your neighbors are,” Deputy Minister Aleksei Volin said. The blacklist was activated on November 1 2012. Since the activation, the telecom regulator has received more than 70,000 applications to block internet resources. More than half of those websites were implicated for allegedly giving out info about drugs, 30% - child porn resources, and 15% - websites promoting or providing information about suicide. After the applications were processed, more than 14,000 resources were blocked. Most of the web hosts complied with the regulator and deleted the information. The regulator reports that only 4% of the websites refused to delete the prohibited content. Currently, the blacklist contains approximately 3,400 resources.

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