MOSCOW, October 21. /TASS/. Silicon Valley and Big Tech’s unrestrained conduct poses a global problem, which is why Russia deplores the fact that the United States lacks the political will to regulate this sphere, Russian Foreign Ministry Deputy Spokesman Oleg Gavrilov said at a meeting of the Federation Council’s interim commission on information policy and media contacts on Thursday.
"The transnational nature of IT platforms and their monopoly position on the global Internet market lead directly to the need to develop explicit and fair international legal grounds for their activities. In this context, it is regrettable that at the moment there is no proper political will to streamline this sphere in the United States, whose comfortable jurisdiction these companies normally hide behind," the diplomat pointed out.
There is a general shortage of responsibility in the world with regard to this problem that "has taken on a truly global dimension," he stressed.
"In this situation, diverse measures are inevitable at the national and regional levels to respond to the increasingly systematic practice of ignoring legitimate requirements that states and their associations are setting for such corporations," Gavrilov explained.
Decisions made in some EU states and at the pan-European level, including those with substantial fines can serve as an example for such a response, he added.
As the Russian Foreign Ministry deputy spokesman emphasized, the persistence of this trend will continue turning this dialogue with Big Tech representatives into a string of endless lawsuits and judicial orders and "in the longer term could lead to the gradual fragmentation of the world’s information space."
"We do not want to move in this direction and favor searching for more civilized forms of finding a fair balance of rights and obligations in this sphere. We believe that this scenario fully meets the interests of IT companies," the Russian diplomat stressed.