Roskomnadsor, Russia’s Federal Supervision Agency for Information Technologies and Communications, may block Facebook if the company fails to comply with the requirements on the placement of the user databases in the territory of the Russian Federation.
“By the end of 2018 we will have run the check of the company [Facebook]. There are several requirements to meet: localization of databases of Russian citizens in the territory of Russia; the removal of all prohibited information … and respect for other laws. If they fail to comply with all the demands, or even any of them, or the Russian government is not informed of their intention to carry out such actions, the issue of blocking will appear,” Roskomnadzor CEO Alexander Zharov told the newspaper Izvestia.
On March 13, a Moscow court ruled for Roskomnadsor that had sued out the blocking of Telegram Messenger in the country.
As reported earlier, the watchdog filed a lawsuit against the company over its refusal to provide the Russian security services with encryption keys. Earlier Roskomnadzor gave Telegram time until 4 April. The representatives of the company say that the architecture of the the service does not allow for such a move.
In 2016, Russia enacted laws to combat terrorism, which required messaging services to provide authorities with the ability to decrypt user correspondence.
However, the messenger partially works. There are many ways to circumvent access restrictions, e.g. TunnelBear, VPN Master, Bat VPN and others. Pavel Durov, the founder of Vkontakte and Telegram, promised to donate millions of dollars to maintain proxy services and VPN.
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