The lower house of the Russian legislature known as Duma has passed in the third reading a draft law binding major foreign IT companies, such as Twitter and Facebook, to open branches or representative offices in Russia and be bound to Russian regulatory authorities.
Africa Today News, New York gathered that by this new law, owners of information resources with a daily audience of over 500,000 Russian users are to establish branches, open representative offices, or found Russian legal entities “that should fully represent the interests of parent companies” from January 1 of next year.
The initiative also introduces a package of measures to enforce Russian laws on IT companies, reported TASS.
Read Also: Twitter Can Be Held ‘Liable’ For #EndSars Losses – FG
They encompass communicating violations of Russian laws to users of Internet resources, bans of advertising on the information resource, payments to it, gathering and cross-border transmission of personal data of Russian nationals. An option of partial or complete blocking of the violating resources is provided as an extreme measure.
The preliminary list of Internet resources, whose owners can be obliged to open branches or representative offices in Russia, includes twenty platforms.
Among them are social networks (Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and Twitter), video hosting providers (YouTube and Twitch.tv), messengers, and mail services (WhatsApp, Telegram, Viber, and Gmail).
Others are search engines (Google and Bing.com), hosting providers (Amazon, Digital Ocean, Cloudflare, and GoDaddy), online commerce (Aliexpress.com, Ikea.com, and Iherb.com), as well as Wikipedia.org.
However, there is a clause in the new law that allows the list to be revised anytime the lawmakers deem it fit.
Africa Today News, New York understands that the bill was introduced to the State Duma on May 21 and was backed by the Russian Government, the Bank of Russia, and the Federal Antimonopoly Service.
AFRICA TODAY NEWS, NEW YORK