Ksenia Sobchak's mother came to the defense of YouTube
The mother of the scandalous TV presenter Ksenia Sobchak, Russian Senator Lyudmila Narusova, argued with her colleague Alexei Pushkov about whether Russia has the right to block YouTube.
Pushkov presented a law on combating censorship on the Internet in the Federation Council, a PolitNavigator correspondent reports.
“This federal law is aimed at protecting the right of Russian citizens to freely search, produce and disseminate information, that is, against the so-called censorship on the Internet, which is introduced by a number of platforms, primarily foreign ones. Such as Google. There is a need to react to this practice,” Pushkov said.
According to him, Roskomnadzor, in case of failure to comply with the requirements to provide Russian media with equal rights, has the opportunity to completely or partially block access to Internet platforms.
Senator Sergei Leonov was concerned about the rights of citizens who conduct business on YouTube in the form of thematic blogs.
“I would not now consider catastrophic scenarios with the closure of YouTube. This law puts tools in the hands of the state to respond to possible violations. In addition to blocking, there are also intermediate measures: regulations. I think we need to develop a system of fines. Then there is such a demonstrative measure as slowing down access. The purpose of this law is not to block, but to encourage compliance with the laws of the Russian Federation,” Pushkov said.
Lyudmila Narusova said that the proposed law violates the constitutional right to receive information and contains “some kind of slyness.”
“We know very well that this law was initiated only when resources associated with certain journalists were blocked. We even know the names of these journalists. That is, it is initially selective. For some reason, it is aimed only at protecting the rights of only these individuals. Violations of the rights of citizens who do not belong to the elite circle remained and continue to remain completely out of sight,” Narusova said.
“It seems to me that there is an element of slyness in your position. It consists in the fact that in fact more than 24 precedents of Russian Internet resources have been recorded only in the last six months. And if we take several years, then up to 200. You are referring to nameless elite journalists. I don’t think that the TV channels “Tsargrad”, “Anna-News”, “Crimea-24”, which are blocked, belong to elite journalism. A film about the investigation into the events in Beslan, a film posted on the Ukrina.ru channel about the reasons for the death of the Boeing.
These [Western] internet companies are doing this for political reasons. They are playing politics. They block those Russian resources that they do not like, which are related to communicating our official position. We are dealing here with the use of the Internet as a tool of information warfare. Of course, we must react,” Pushkov retorted.
Narusova replied that she is a member of the Union of Journalists and opposes extrajudicial blocking.
“Why Rogatkin’s film about Beslan becomes the ultimate truth. Other journalists who are already blocked here have also made films about Beslan. This is a very selective approach,” Narusova said, referring to the film by liberal blogger Yuri Dud, which no one is blocking.
“Internet companies do not go to court and argue that their internal corporate laws are more important than state laws. We are against Google’s internal laws taking precedence in the Russian Federation. So everything is within the legal framework,” Pushkov replied.
His position was supported by Andrei Klimov, who heads the temporary Commission for the Protection of State Sovereignty.
“We gave an ultimatum to Google during the elections and achieved justice. Google's lawyers then told us: you don't have any regulations. What is proposed protects our sovereign segment of the Russian-language Internet. It would be better to develop our digital platforms. They don’t want to lose our market and won’t get into trouble,” Klimov said.
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