Under the current Russian Law, different search engine operators were allowed to censor search results. With this, different sites which were remarked illegal, the search engines were said to remove such sites as soon as possible. Hence, as for Google, they have got a tight slap for different Site-Blocking Failures.
After failing to abide by the rules, Google has been fined a huge amount of 500,000 rubles. They have certainly failed to connect their systems with the FGIS Blacklist database for which they are paying the price.
Google Facing Site-Blocking Failures Under the Russian Law
The very last year, Russians introduced a legislation which can impose fine on search engines for not complying with their law. Here, different VPN link and anonymous users will also be fined with immediate effect.
Here, all the search engines were said to give up to date information on the rendering of their domains.
The database FGIS must have been utilized by Google but the reason as of now is quite unclear.
Moving ahead, weeks ago, the watchdog Roscomnadzor had a meeting with Google where they said to connect with the FGIS market.
However, Google still didn’t comply and breached Russia’s federal law.
With this, Google was left in vain and will have to face a fine between 500,000 & 700,000. Further, they said that Google must connect their databases with the FGIS at the earliest.
Now, despite the meeting between Head of Roskomnadzor and the Director of Google’s public policy and government relations for Europe, the deadline went in vain.
A Word of Mouth by Roscomnadzor
“Failure to comply with these requirements constitutes an administrative offence (Part 1 of Article 13.40 of the Administrative Code of the Russian Federation). The sanction of this article provides for a legal fine in the amount of from 500 to 700 thousand rubles,” a Roscomnadzor statement reads.
In addition, Roscomnadzor even said that Google is continuing to breach the law and site-blocking failures are still happening.
From the side of Google, nothing is clarified yet which is the reason for fine imposing.
While not every fine is good, the fine on Google is still on the lower side. It’s definitely a multi-billion dollar company and such fines will definitely not harm their reputation and revenue.
Earlier November, the majority of the rights holders and other tech companies signed a memorandum. This will help to deal with piracy on a much stronger scale and with immediate effect.
After which, none of the small private piracy companies will find it easier to spread piracy.
Read More: Stunning Blocking Order Is Targeting Pirate Domains Before Registering Process
Final Word of Mouth: Google Facing Site-Blocking Failures under the Russian Law
Summing up the whole matter, Google has got no option rather to comply with the Russian law. They will need to connect their system with the database and prevent further site-blocking failures.
On the other hand, the Russian government is busy in levying anti-piracy laws which can curb piracy.
Finally, for a multi-national company like Google, if they want to keep running in Russia, complying with the law is the sole answer.
content credit- Torrent Freak
