Tech majors Google has started complying with Russian rules of blocking undesirable materials including internationally licensed online gambling sites from the results acquired in their search engine.
The Russian media reported this weekend that tech giant Google began fiddling its local search engine results of “resources that are prohibited” which have made into the blacklist of the Russian telecom watchkeeper dog Roskomnadzor.
Google needs to connect to the Federal State Information System (FGIS) as recommended by the Russian Law. This will monitor the Unified Register of Prohibited Information so that the blacklisted domains suffer an automatic blockage from appearing in the Russian search results.
Yandex and Mail.ru the local firms of Russia had linked their systems to the FGIS, but Google remained as a conspicuous holdout. Roskomnadzor opened an administrative case against Google back at November. Google was even fined with a hefty US$7,500 two weeks later claiming that the search giants do not carry out irrefutable proof filtering.
Google opted out from appealing its Russian fine, which was a little less than the maximum penalty allowed under the Russian Law. Considering the $640 million that Google’s Russian facing operations earned back in 2017, a $7,300 penalty didn’t encourage the firm enough.
On Christmas Eve the Russian news agency TASS said that Roskomnadzor head Alexander Zharov acknowledging that the fine imposed is a minor amount of money for an organization like Google. Zharov also mentioned that Roskomnadzor was continuously monitoring Google’s search results on a daily basis which showed that the search giants still provide links to blacklisted websites.
It is precisely unclear to what made Google finally fall for Roskomnadzor’s demands. This stood as an unlikely new year’s resolution for Google. However as previously suggested by the Russian legislators about imposing new measures which could fine offending companies by 1% of their annual revenue generated in Russia.
Interfax was told by Roskomnadzor ’s deputy chief Vadim Subbotin that Google’s Russian facing sites could find itself blocked if the company didn’t game up their compliance policy. Roskomnadzor being the undisputed heavyweight champion of internet censorship in Europe, they routine block more than several thousand undesirable gambling domains every week. The final figures for 2018 are not out yet, but Roskomnadzor expects to double the figure when it comes to the number of sites blocked by the censorship than achieved in 2017.
However, this insane total number of blocked domains only serves below it’s a score to the futility of Roskomnadzor’s game of Domain block-a-mole, something that even the watchdog considers as a failure. Roskomnadzor announced in December that they are trying their best to achieve more efficient censoring system based on ‘deep packet inspection’ of all Internet Traffic entering Russian borders.
