Russia threatens fines on Facebook, Google for deleting illegal content

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Russia threatens fines on Facebook, Google for deleting illegal content

The logo of Russia's state communication regulator, Roskomnadzor, is depicted in this picture illustration taken February 12, 2019. REUTERS Maxim Shemetov Image Photo : ReUTERS Maxim Hermetov

Russia on 16 Sept. Reuters : Russia threatened an international media firm with huge fines if they fail to delete content the Moscow government deems illegal and demanded Apple and Google stop meddling in its internal affairs on the eve of the parliamentary elections.

Internet services are experiencing increasing pressure ahead of Russia's Jan. 17 - 19 parliamentary vote in Russia. Russia's authorities have said foreign firms are hampering their efforts to restrict private networks for virtual resources including VPNs and online resources linked to detained Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny. Previously, a long-running dispute over banned content looked set to move up after Roskomnadzor, deputy chief of state communications regulator Vadim Subbotin, signalled which fines could be possible.

We will now apply turnover fines on those companies that systematically violate Roskomnadzor's demands, Subbotin reported news agency Interfax as saying.

While Russia has already levied several smaller fines on foreign tech companies, imposing penalties based on their turnover suggests potentially much larger sums.

Subbotin named Facebook FB.O Twitter TWTR.N and Google Alphabet's GOOGL.O Google as some of the firms at risk

Roskomnadzor has advanced tools capable of enforcing the requirements of Russian law, he said, without giving further details.

Since March, Roskomnadzor has successfully blocked Twitter's speed, impeded some VPN providers from operating and blocked major DNS service in the torrential domain system for several hours. The Chinese country is actually far ahead of Russia in terms of blocking capabilities, says IT expert Mikhail Klimarev to Reuters.

Earlier on Thursday, lawmaker Andrei Klimov said Russian prosecutors had made official approaches to Apple AAPL.O CEO Tim Cook and Google CEO Sundar Pichai from Sept 9, telling them to stop breaking Russian law by using Navalny's foreign voting app on their companies' stores for unknown transactions.

Klimov's actions during the Russian elections are seen by Interfax as purely domestic and is directly linked to interference in illegal domestic matters, Interfax cited Apple as saying.

Apple and Google did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Apple's AppStore suffered an outage earlier this week and GlobalCheck, a group that monitors websites' accessibility in Russia, late on Wednesday said telecoms operators had started blocking access to Google Docs.