Russian Experts Eye Plans for Tighter Registration of Websites
Text of report by Russian newspaper Gazeta, owned by metals magnate Vladimir Lisin, on 12 February
[Feature compiled by Svetlana Kazantseva, Andrey Biryukov and Aleksey Smirnov: "To the slanderers of Russia"]
Introduction sites, internet search engines and social networks on Runet [the Russian internet] could become mass information media, with all the ensuing rights and duties. The initiative to bring the activities of Russian internet resources under the provisions of the law on the mass media was put forward yesterday by Federation Council member Vladimir Slutsker. According to his idea, websites that receive more than 1,000 hits per day should undergo compulsory registration as mass media. Those with smaller audiences could do the same on a voluntary basis.
The senators decided to tackle the internet in order to make internet publications play by civilized rules, and also to veto the publication of “dirt”. “For instance, Article 57 currently exempts the mass media from responsibility for the publication of slanderous and unreliable information, if this information is a verbatim reproduction of reports or material disseminated by another mass media outlet. This situation opens up a loophole in legislation for unscrupulous journalists and publications, who can reprint any disinformation from the internet without bearing any responsibility,” Vladimir Slutsker explains his motives.
Vladimir Slutsker has a lot of experience on this issue. Recently the journalist Oleg Lurye was arrested for extorting money from the senator by threatening to publish supposedly compromising material about him on the internet. True, it is not yet clear how it is planned to regulate the internet: the senators’ wishes have not taken documentary form. “No draft law has been prepared yet. At the moment consultations are taking place with experts about the legal phrasing. It is not possible to give a detailed answer to questions about the technical fulfilment of the draft law. These questions are currently being studied,” Vladimir Slutsker’s press secretary Yekaterina Shatalina told Gazeta’s correspondent. But it is already clear that the new version of the law on the mass media will require amendments concerning the internet. According to Ru-centre, the company that registers domain names, Russia currently has about 900,000 active websites. How many of these have traffic of more than 1,000 hits per day, nobody has counted.
“There is support among the public for the adoption of the draft law,” Shatalina asserts. “Vladimir Slutsker initiated the draft law because he is deputy chairman of the Commission on Nationalities Policy and Relations Between the State and Religious Organizations, which combats manifestations of extremism, including extremist media reporting.”
Admittedly, as Gazeta’s correspondent was told by Ru-centre, Russian users are not very interested in extremist sites. What they want to do on the internet is to get acquainted, contact one another and find useful information. By Vladimir Slutsker’s logic, introduction sites, social networks and search engines, which have the highest level of hits, should undergo compulsory registration as mass media. People in the senator’s team are aware of this basically absurd situation, but as far as the absence of clarity about the draft law is concerned, they point out that there is in any case no clear and comprehensive definition of what the mass information media are in Russia. “What we need to do now, first and foremost, is to formulate that definition,” Yekaterina Shatalina admitted.
What are mass media
According to the law on the mass media, a registered internet publication has the same rights and duties as any other mass media outlet, and that means the same restrictions as all the mass media. Article 4 of the law on the mass media explains how a mass media outlet does not have the right to “abuse freedom”. The mass media may not disseminate materials containing public calls for the carrying out of terrorist activities or publicly justifying terrorism, and are obliged to refrain from publishing other extremist materials, as well as materials propagandizing pornography and the cult of violence and cruelty. But the rights and duties of an internet site are unlimited, because the internet is entirely outside the legal field. “Information posted on the internet in a given domain is the personal responsibility of the domain administrator,” Andrey Vorobyev, head of Ru-centre’s public- relations department, emphasized in an interview with Gazeta’s correspondent. The liberalization of the law in the sphere of domain registration has led to the development of the Runet zone, and people have begun to go there. In order to enter the Runet zone, you only have to complete the registration form and pay an initial fee of R600 [around 24 dollars], and after that, R450 [around 18 dollars] a year. The adoption of this draft law, in Andrey Vorobyev’s opinion, would lead to a tightening of the screws and the loss of money for the registration body. “Users will simply go outside Russia’s jurisdiction. You can easily register in the .com zone on American sites and disseminate any kind of information, even extremist information. It is impossible to track down a domain administrator who is registered in that way. The only way is to look for him through the provider,” Andrea Vorobyev noted.
You cannot list them all
Legal experts in the mass media field are sceptical about the possibility that Slutsker’s draft law could be implemented. “The draft law is impossible to fulfil technically, above all,” in the view of Fedor Kravchenko, managing partner of the Collegium of Mass Media Lawyers. When the law on the mass media was adopted in 1991, they had no concept of the Internet, but Article 24, which talks about other mass media, declares that periodical print publications disseminated with a print run of over 1,000 copies and created with the use of computers are subject to registration. The same article states that the rules of registration established for radio and television programmes also apply to the periodical dissemination of mass information through the teletext and videotext systems and other telecommunications networks. So internet sites, as text created on a computer and disseminated through telecommunications networks, were subject to registration.
However, the government realized that it is impossible not only to issue a licence to every site, but even to register them all, Kravchenko says. Then it was tacitly decided that the internet media would register voluntarily. It is now even more impossible for Rossvyazokhrankultura [Federal Service for Supervision of Compliance with the Law in the Sphere of Mass Communication and Preservation of Cultural Heritage - the media regulator] to register and issue licences for the activity of internet sites. First, the agency’s staff is small. The adoption of the draft law would mean that the waiting line for registration would be swamped. In addition, in Kravchenko’s view, Rossvyazokhrankultura is not ready, from the viewpoint of the law. “For instance, an internet site might have a name and content that do not coincide. The site could call itself Romashka, but be on the gvozdik.ru domain. What is to be done about that?” he noted.
The thousand and one amendments
“Extrapolating laws that work well with the traditional media to cover internet publications could backfire,” Sergey Molchanov, general director of the RBK hosting centre, warns. The internet, in his view, is too mobile an environment and its behaviour cannot always be regulated by traditional legislative frameworks. “These amendments raise many questions. How, for instance, will they track the publications with more than 1,000 hits, and who will count the visitors? Who will be accountable,” Molchanov noted, “if a resource’s number of hits goes over 1,000 but the resource is not registered as a mass media outlet? And finally, under the new law, what will have to be done about popular bloggers with scores over 1,000?”
Vsevolod Bogdanov, chairman of the Russian Journalists Union, believes that such initiatives arise among senators and deputies not out of a desire to protect the public, but out of a desire to show personal initiative, especially where it is safe to do so. “As for thinking about journalists and adopting laws so that journalists can feel protected in legal and economic terms – that does not enter their heads. But creating new fences and barriers – that’s easy. I would like to remind you that in the United States they adopted just one amendment to the Constitution concerning the mass media: all the press is free,” Vsevolod Bogdanov told Gazeta’s correspondent.
They want to equate websites with the mass media. What will come of it?
Mikhail Fedotov, minister of press and information in 1992-1993 and one of the authors of the law “On the mass media”:
The regulation concerning other mass information media that is currently in force in our country has existed in the law on the mass media from the outset, since 1991. At that time there was no internet in Russia at all. Therefore it is probably not a good idea to apply it (Article 24 of the law on the media) to the internet without amending it to conform with the legal realities. But that in no way prevents anyone from applying to Rossvyazokhrankultura to request registration of a website as an electronic mass media outlet. After which the creative workers who create the site content receive the status of journalists, and their leader that of chief editor. And that leads to all the privileges stipulated in the law on the mass media. But if you do not register your site as a mass media outlet, you get nothing. That is to say, everything is voluntary, that is how Article 24 is applied.
As far as the new draft law is concerned, unfortunately I am not familiar with its text. Therefore it is difficult to comment in any concrete way. But if we assume that all sites with a hit rate of more than 1,000 per day are to be equated with mass media, then this must also include the websites of the Federation Council, its individual commissions and committees and senators. I do not know whether the initiators of the amendments to the law on the mass media have websites, but I am sure that they have no plans to become editors or founders of mass media outlets, with all the ensuing legal consequences.
Of course there are many problems on the internet, and there could be all kinds of approaches to them. The main thing is in each specific case clearly to identify the objective of the legal regulation and to find appropriate means of achieving it. For instance, I think registration of all state information resources should be introduced. So that when someone goes to a website like www.government.ru [1], he knows that he is looking at a real official government site and not some kind of private initiative.
But when it comes to private individuals, matters are complicated. After all, the internet does not recognize state borders, and the state’s internal legislation does not recognize the borders of the internet. Therefore the authors of the new law should decide what part of the net they intend to regulate. For instance, in the case of the ocean there is the 200-mile littoral economic zone, the high seas, territorial waters and so forth. In the case of the internet, it is the same thing. Obviously the associated activities must be regulated. But it should not be forgotten that this is the ocean. And different things happen there: one person goes for a swim, another goes fishing, someone else extracts oil, but someone else steals money, someone else disseminates pornography…
It is impossible to create a universal law for all this diversity of activity. The problems of internet trading, the problems of spam, cyber-squatting and so forth, should all be examined separately. In addition, fundamental international norms are needed, something like the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea. But it is pointless to create our very own, Russian code of maritime law.
Finally, as far as legal infringements on the global net are concerned, undoubtedly they happen. But infringements are committed by specific individuals: Russian Federation citizen Ivanov, French citizen Dupont and so forth. And wherever they may have committed these infringements (on the internet, on the fence, on the street – wherever you like), they should be punished for it. But it is they, the perpetrators of the infringements, who should be punished, and not the websites, not the access providers, not the site editors. I believe that the principle that should operate here is: whatever is banned offline should also be banned online. But trying to punish websites is like trying to part the sea. They already tried in ancient times: you know the result.
Aleksey Simonov, president of the Glasnost Defence Foundation:
The result will be that some websites will become more modest and will stop insisting that they are read by 1,500 people a day (they will say that in actual fact the number of readers is, say, no more than 600). Other sites will become mass media, but they will not be doing this because they want to, but because they are forced to. Finally, a third group of sites will simply close. In short, I do not think that what we are discussing is the best way of protecting freedom of speech on the internet. At the same time, it is hardly likely to have much effect on content.
Anton Nosik, expert for the Sup company [which owns LiveJournal, Russia's most popular blogging platform]:
Nothing will come of it, because Slutsker has failed to take note of the requirements of the task. He simply does not know that at one time then Press Minister Mikhail Lesin went to then Prime Minister Vladimir Putin with a draft government decree on the compulsory registration of all websites on the Russian internet as mass media outlets. But since, at that time, there was nothing much to control, Lesin’s objective was to ensure that his ministry would simply make money from the growth of the net. However, Putin did not sign off on the decree, which was presented at a meeting between Putin and the internet community. Because we all expressed our opinion on this document, and Putin said in so many words that the Chinese model of the internet would not happen in our country. Well, since then, he has kept his word, and as yet I see no reason not to trust Putin.
Originally published by Gazeta, Moscow, in Russian 12 Feb 08.
(c) 2008 BBC Monitoring Former Soviet Union. Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning. All rights Reserved.