PRESS: Russia can make search engines equal to mass media

MOSCOW, Feb 25 (PRIME) -- Russia’s State Duma, the parliament’s lower house, has received for consideration amendments to a law on information, which will make big search engines and mass media equal and cap foreign ownership in them by 20%, business daily Kommersant reported Thursday.

The bill introduces a special right regime for the Internet resources with the number of users of more than 1 million per day – which accumulate, process and distribute information – and offers a new term “a news aggregator”.

The communications service is supposed to have the right of keeping a register of such aggregators. The bill seeks to order search engines to “check truthfulness of distributed publicly important information,” including information coming from mass media, and offers to introduce pre-court elimination of unreliable information upon complaint of authorized entities, whose list will be drawn by the government.

According to the bill, a news aggregator must be a national company with foreign interest of no more than 20%. The document gives companies six months to align with the law.

“We are filling in a legal vacuum; it does not involve the mass media whose activities are well regulated,” one of the document’s authors, Alexei Kazakov, a member of the Just Russia political party, said. News aggregators should use information with responsibility, he said.

A source in the State Duma said that the bill engages up to 30 companies, including Internet giants Yandex, Mail.Ru Group, Google, Rambler, as well as social networks VKontakte and Facebook.

A Yandex spokesperson said that the service Yandex.News will not survive if it has to check news.

“Every day Yandex.News indexes more than 100,000 news from almost 7,000 sources. Yandex.News does not have an editorial staff, and the service automatically assembles news from partners and shows their headlines and fragments. Yandex’s news aggregator does not publish news in full and readers follow links to partners’ Web sites,” the spokesperson said.

“In such a way, Yandex.News is intrinsically limited in its options to check the truthfulness of the news prepared by third parties and cannot be held responsible for such information.”

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