MOSCOW, September 16. /TASS/. US IT giants take advantage of the lack of regulations at the level of international law and systemically avoid complying with the Russian national law, pointing towards their own national jurisdiction, Russian Foreign Ministry deputy spokesman Oleg Gavrilov said at the Federation Council Commission on prevention of foreign meddling meeting Thursday.
"We regularly raise the question of the unacceptability of the IT giants’ practice that takes roots right before our eyes to exercise arbitrariness, to take advantage of the lack of international regulatory frameworks in an increasingly malicious fashion, and in systemically avoiding compliance with the Russian law under the pretext of their geographical origin," he noted.
According to Gavrilov, the examples of Apple and Google are "outrageous in many regards, but far from unique."
"[There is] an impressive amount of statistics of unmotivated decisions on the restriction of access to resources for the users or, on the contrary, ignored requests for the removal of illegal content, as well on paid monetary fines among such flagships of big tech as Twitter, Facebook and so on," Gavrilov said. "The deceptive sense of invincibility and impunity has reached such proportions that it has effectively made it possible for such companies to react to court rulings with ultimatums - for example, when YouTube threatened to stop removing illegal content from search results if the Tsargrad’s lawsuit is satisfied."
Meanwhile, he pointed out, the US IT giants’ monopolistic position in the informational sphere and their increasing influence on political processes becomes a concerning event for the countries that refer to themselves as the "Collective West."
According to the diplomat, court rulings made in Germany, France, South Korea, Ireland and a number of US states have become resonant. In the EU, Gavrilov reminded, Google alone was faced with a 9.5 billion euro fine for non-compliance with the anti-monopoly legislation.
"The key aspect in these matters is not the size of the fine, but the inevitability of enforcement of court verdicts. Unfortunately, this is still far from always being the case," Gavrilov concluded.