In Russia on Wednesday, November 1, the law on banning the use of anonymizers for access to blocked Internet resources came into force.

The document, signed in July by Russian President Vladimir Putin, obliges owners of anonymizers and VPN services to block access to resources that are on the black list of Roskomnadzor, otherwise they will be blocked by themselves. Operators search engines, in turn, should disable the display of links to blocked resources.

According to Roskomnadzor, about 86 thousand sites are currently blocked on a permanent basis. Most of them (81.5 thousand) published information about drugs, suicides, online casinos, explosives and child pornography. At the same time, "pirate resources" in the list of only 1.8 thousand. Blockings, according to the head of the department Alexander Zharov, bypass no more than 7-10 percent of Russians.

Meanwhile, Internet ombudsman Dmitry Marinichev expressed the opinion that this law can not be implemented. He noted that often VPN-services and similar technologies are used not only by private persons, but also by companies, in order to protect the transmitted information.

For his part, the head of the Russian State Duma's information policy committee Leonid Levin recalled that the document made a reservation for encryption of networks of legal entities using anonymizers for corporate purposes.

The law also stipulates that it does not apply to operators of state information systems, state bodies and local self-government bodies.

Source: DW.