Bill equating news aggregators to mass media cos submitted to Duma - paper
MOSCOW. Feb 25 (Interfax) - A group of legislators from the Just Russia and Communist parties has submitted a bill to the State Duma to amend the law On Information, Information Technologies and Protection of Information and the Code of Administrative Offences of Russia that would essentially equate major news aggregators to mass media companies, national daily Kommersant reported on Thursday.
Under the bill, a news aggregator would have to be a Russian legal entity with foreign ownership of no more than 20%, which are the same requirements that went into effect for mass media companies in Russia as of this year. The bill gives aggregators six months to bring their corporate structure in line with the new requirements.
The bill introduces a special legal regime for Internet resources that collect, process and distribute information, and introduces the new concept of "news aggregator," the paper said. The regime would apply to aggregators with more than 1 million users per day.
The authors of the bill propose that the Federal Communications & IT Oversight Service (Roskomnadzor) maintain a register of such resources.
The passage of the bill would make it impossible for the news aggregation services of public Russian Internet companies Yandex and Mail.ru Group, which are traded on respectively Nasdaq and the London Stock Exchange with a free float of more than 20%, as well as those of U.S. technology giant Google to continue to operate in Russia.
The bill also obligates news aggregators to "verify the accuracy of disseminated socially important information," including the mass media outlet that is the source, and provides for extrajudicial "adoption of measures to stop the dissemination of unreliable information" based on a complaint from authorized agencies. The list of such agencies would be determined by the government.
The paper reported Yandex as saying that its Yandex.News service would not be able to exist if it was required to verify news items.
"Yandex.News indexes more than 100,000 news reports from almost 7,000 sources every day. Yandex.News does not have an editorial office; the service automatically gathers news reports from partners and shows their headlines and fragments in the same form. The Yandex news aggregator does not publish the full texts of the news reports - readers go to the sites of the partners via links. Therefore, Yandex.News is objectively limited in its ability to verify the legality and reliability of news information prepared by third parties and cannot be held responsible for such information," Kommersant quoted Yandex as saying.
