Russian-language Wikipedia shut down for a day in protest

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The Russian-language version of the internet project Wikipedia went offline for 24 hours on Tuesday in protest against State Duma Bill No. 89417-6, which is currently under consideration, Interfax reports.

“Today, July 10, the Duma is holding hearings on amendments to the Law on Information, which could lead to the creation of extrajudicial censorship of the entire Russian-language internet, including blocking access to Russian-language Wikipedia,” reads a statement on the project’s main page.

It notes that “the Wikipedia community protests against the introduction of censorship that is dangerous for free knowledge open to all humanity.”

According to the statement, the amendments being considered in the State Duma “could become the basis for real internet censorship—the creation of a list of banned websites and IP addresses with their subsequent filtering.”

“Lobbyists and activists supporting these amendments claim they are directed solely against content such as child pornography ‘and the like,’ but following the provisions and wording put forward for discussion will lead to the creation of a Russian equivalent of the ‘Great Firewall of China.’”

“In the recent past, similar protest tactics were tested by Italian and American colleagues of the Russian Wikipedia creators. Thus, in October 2011, the creators of the Italian version decided to temporarily remove all published articles in protest against a bill prohibiting the public disclosure of intercepted telephone conversations, and in January of this year, American editors shut down access to the site for 24 hours in protest against the introduction of the new Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) in the USA.”

“The practice of law enforcement in Russia indicates a high probability of the worst-case scenario, under which access to Wikipedia will soon be closed across the entire country,” says the statement from the creators of the online encyclopedia project.

The State Duma passed the bill in the first reading on Friday, July 6. The document proposes creating a register of sites, pages, and network addresses that host information containing content dangerous for children—a so-called “blacklist” system for websites. Primarily, this includes child pornography, suicide instructions, and drug-related instructions, RIA Novosti reminds.

Sites and pages will not be added to this register automatically. The oversight body, which is expected to be Roskomnadzor, will assign a non-commercial organization the task of monitoring websites with illegal information.

After discovering such sites and pages, the non-commercial organization will forward this information to Roskomnadzor, which, in turn, must warn the internet resource owner about the detection of illegal content.

If the owner does not respond and remove it within 24 hours, the hosting provider will have to do it. If neither does so, the page ends up on the “blacklists.”

The agency will also monitor other illegal content on the internet, such as war propaganda or incitement of ethnic hatred. In this case, the resource will be included in the register only by a court decision.

According to another provision of the bill, information that a film or program is not recommended for children under a certain age will be displayed not only at the start of the broadcast but also after commercial breaks.

Many internet industry participants had previously expressed concern about the possible introduction of content filtering.

On Friday, Russian Minister of Communications and Mass Media Nikolay Nikiforov stated the need to refine this bill. According to his Twitter message, the idea of the bill in terms of protecting children from undesirable information is correct, but there is a problem with the implementation mechanism.

The need for public discussion and refinement of the internet filtering bill is also voiced by major internet companies—Google, Yandex, and Mail.Ru Group.

Members of the Presidential Council for the Development of Civil Society and Human Rights also spoke out against the adoption of this bill. As council representatives note, the bill is not aimed at combating the causes of illegal content and its spread on the internet and will not contribute to increasing the effectiveness of law enforcement and prosecuting criminals, who can move resources with illegal content to other domains and IP addresses.

Others in the Russian internet industry—representatives of the blog hosting service LiveJournal, the Coordination Center for the National Internet Domain, the Foundation for the Advancement of Internet Technologies and Infrastructure, and the Russian Association of Electronic Communications—had also previously spoken about the bill’s shortcomings.

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