Vladimir Putin enacted a law that requires tech giants to open offices in Russia if they are to avoid sanctions and lockdowns

The President of Russia, Vladimir Poutine, promulgated this Thursday a law that will force foreign tech giants such as Facebook, Twitter or Google to open representative offices in the country if they do not want to face sanctions or a blockade.

The law is part of Russia’s broader policy of punish US internet giants with fines and other restrictions for failing to remove content prohibited by domestic law or for blocking content from Russian media.

The regulation is directed against technology companies with a daily audience or a number of users greater than 500,000 in Russia and requires them to establish subsidiaries, full-fledged representative offices or Russian legal entities in the country.

The heads of these offices must be able to fully represent the interests of their parent companies, so that they will have to take responsibility if they violate Russian laws and be the main channel of interaction with local regulators.

They will also have to open a personal account on the site of Roskomnadzor, the Russian communications regulator, among other requirements.

If large tech companies ignored the requirements, they would face a series of punitive measures.

The most serious sanctions are a partial or total blocking of your activities.

The law also provides for the possibility of Russian authorities block internet search results or limit country’s user fees.

It also introduces a ban on showing advertisements in Russian on the sanctioned company and the company itself in Russia.

The preliminary list of companies that will have to open subsidiaries or representative offices in Russia includes: 20 platforms.

It refers to social networks (Facebook, Instagram, TikTok and Twitter), video services such as YouTube and Twitch.tv, instant messaging applications (WhatsApp, Telegram, Viber), messaging services (Gmail), engines search (Google, Bing), web hosts (Amazon, Digital Ocean, Cloudflare, GoDaddy) and online stores (Aliexpress, Ikea and Iherb) and Wikipedia.

The list can be adapted and the sanctions will be applied in stages and only after repeated warnings.

In March, the Russian regulator decided slow down the publication of photos and videos on the Twitter social network due to “systematic non-compliance” with local legislation, a measure that was only partially lifted after the company began removing banned content.

The prohibited contents that must be removed are those targeted incitement to suicide by minors, child pornography, drug use or calls to participate in unauthorized demonstrations, such as those held in support of Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny, currently in jail on a former criminal case after surviving poisoning in August of last year.

(With information from EFE)

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