Bill No. 89417-6 was introduced to the State Duma of the Russian Federation on June 7, 2012 by four deputies-members of four Duma factions on behalf of the Committee on Family, Women and Children. He proposes changes to four existing laws that should make it difficult for children to access information harmful to health.
The main provisions of the bill this spring were publicly discussed on the website of the League of Safe Internet Association and at the conference “RIF + CIB 2012”, organized by the Russian Association for Electronic Communications. The main goal of the bill is to make it difficult for certain information materials to access the Russian Internet zone. We are talking about child pornography, the promotion of drugs, psychotropic drugs, suicide. The main changes, according to the bill, should be made to the federal laws "On information, information technology and the protection of information" and "On the protection of children from information that is harmful to their health and development." In addition to them, amendments must be made to the Code of Administrative Offenses of the Russian Federation and to the Law "On Communications".
The mechanism for blocking dangerous website content, which is proposed in the bill, assumes that a special organization will be created, whose responsibilities will include monitoring and marking web pages. The labeling will be carried out for five age groups, and the databases compiled in this way will then be assessed according to the criteria described in the legislation. The domain names of the offending websites will be added to the "black list" and blocked by all Internet providers in the Russian Federation.
The bill passed its first hearing on July 6, 2012 and caused a considerable negative reaction both from the public and from officials and politicians. In particular, the Presidential Council for the Development of Civil Society and Human Rights, the Minister of Communications of the Russian Federation, and the Russian Association for Electronic Communications expressed their complaints about the proposed formulations. Basically, the objections were related to the lack of clarity with the organization that should draw up the "black lists". There were also enough vague objections to the introduction of any censorship on the Internet - the daily self-blocking of the Russian section of Wikipedia caused the greatest resonance.
In the second and third readings, which took place on July 11, the draft law with the amendments was approved by the State Duma deputies, and on July 18, the deputies of the Federation Council did the same.
