Site owners with a daily audience of more than 500 000 Russians to be required to open representative offices in Russia

Owners of large information resources with a daily audience in the Russian Federation of 500 000 people are to be required to open official representative offices in Russia. A bill containing this provision will be submitted to the State Duma soon, according to Alexander Khinshtein in his Telegram channel.

He described the document as a “landing” bill, which would set “the rules of the game” for the activities of large internet companies in Russia.

“Many of the IT giants openly abuse their monopoly position, violating the requirements of our legislation. Primarily this concerns the dissemination of the most socially dangerous information,” he wrote.

The official noted that, because most of these companies lack Russian representative offices, it is virtually impossible to hold them to account for violations of the law in Russia.

To ensure that companies do not ignore the requirement to open offices within the Russian Federation, the bill introduces a series of enforcement measures. Among them:

• informing users of the resource about violations of Russian law;
• prohibition on advertising about the platform, and on it;
• prohibition on making payments to the internet resource;
• prohibition on collection and cross-border transfer of personal data.

President Vladimir Putin instructed the development of additional requirements for foreign technology companies operating in Russia, including obligations to open representative offices in Russia, in early 2021.

At that time, the State Duma Committee on Information Policy reported development of the corresponding bill.

Apparently, the new bill is aimed primarily at social networks. According to the law that came into force in February, social networks are considered internet resources with the ability to create personal profiles and a daily audience of more than 500 000 users from Russia.

In March, Roskomnadzor began throttling Twitter’s operations in Russia due to the platform’s refusal to remove content the agency deemed illegal.

Later, a Russian court fined Twitter in the amount of 8.9 million rubles for violations of the law, namely for disseminating information urging minors to participate in an unauthorized protest in Moscow.

Fines for similar violations were imposed on other social networks as well. TikTok was fined 2.6 million rubles, “VKontakte” — 1.5 million rubles, Telegram — 5 million rubles.

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