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State Duma adopts bill on foreign IT-giants activities in Russia in 2nd reading

The new law stipulates that owners of information resources, whose daily audience includes more than 500,000 of Russian users, should create branches, open representative offices or establish Russian legal entities from January 1, 2022

© AP Photo Jon Super

MOSCOW, June 16. /TASS/. The State Duma, the lower house of the Russian parliament, has adopted the bill regulating the activities of big foreign internet companies in Russia in the second reading.

In the course of finalization of the document for the second reading, it did not undergo significant changes.

The new law stipulates that owners of information resources, whose daily audience includes more than 500,000 of Russian users, should create branches, open representative offices or establish Russian legal entities from January 1, 2022, "which must fully represent the interests of the parent companies," the document says.

The initiative also introduces a set of measures to force IT companies to comply with Russian legislation. Such measures include a ban on the distribution of advertising on an information resource, on making payments to it, a ban on search results, as well as informing users of Internet resources about violations of the legislation of the Russian Federation.

As a last resort, the possibility of partial or complete blocking of the offending resource is provided.

Regulation of IT companies

The preliminary list of Internet resources, the owners of which may be obliged to open branches or representative offices in Russia, includes 20 platforms. It includes social networks (Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Twitter), video hosting (YouTube, Twitch.tv), instant messengers (WhatsApp, Telegram, Viber), mail service (Gmail), search engines (Google, Bing.com), hosting providers (Amazon, Digital Ocean, Cloudflare, GoDaddy), online stores (Aliexpress.com, Ikea.com, Iherb.com), and Wikipedia.org. At the same time, this list can be adjusted.

Earlier, Alexander Khinshtein, one of the authors of the initiative, the head of the State Duma Committee on Information Policy, said that enforcement measures against IT companies that violate the laws of the Russian Federation will be applied in stages and only after repeated ignoring of instructions of the media watchdog.

State Duma Speaker Viacheslav Volodin noted that regulation of IT giants is a common legal practice in many countries. In his opinion, foreign companies had the opportunity to follow the path of self-regulation, but they did not take advantage of it, therefore, legislative regulation is necessary, including the introduction of enforcement measures.

The bill was submitted to the State Duma on May 21 by a group of members of the Duma Committee on Information Policy and Senator Alexei Pushkov. The document received the support of the Russian government, the Bank of Russia and the Federal Antimonopoly Service.

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