Watchdog says foreign IT firms have to create offices in Russia

MOSCOW, Feb 10 (PRIME) -- The Federal Service for Communications, IT, and Mass Media Oversight has suggested that the government issue a law obliging foreign IT and internet companies that work in Russia create representation offices, Deputy Head Milosh Vagner said on Wednesday at a meeting of the State Duma, the parliament’s lower house.

Currently, there are no representation offices of foreign Internet platforms that could have responded to requests from the service, he said.

“We send all our requests, notifications, letters, and correspondence to foreign jurisdictions, mainly to the U.S. and the U.K., this is why all our notifications are considered under the law of these countries. They sometimes use their internal politics, and sometimes they use platform’s rules. … This is why our first suggestion is to think about creating a regulation that would result in creation of full-scale representation offices,” Vagner said.

He also suggested introducing administrative penalties for violation of the law on large social networks.

On February 1, amendments to the law on information came into force obliging owners of social networks with daily audiences in Russia of more than 500,000 users prevent the spread of banned information like calls for terrorism, extremist materials, pornography, and others.

“The law came into force, but there is no established practice of applying the law, and there is no penalty for non-compliance. This is why we should envisage administrative penalties for non-compliance with the law,” Vagner said.

Alexei Zhafyarov, deputy head of a department of the Prosecutor General’s Office, said that the government should also think about financial penalties for the Internet platforms where teenagers publish their calls for participation in illegal actions.

“We’ve said already that many teenagers published these calls on Twitter, TikTok, and Instagram for the so-called hype, to expand their subscribers and so on. This is why if these sites were created with an obvious goal of making a profit, there is sense in thinking about a reasonable administrative response in a financial sense. This would make publications of these calls for hype financially disadvantageous,” he said.

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