New draconian legislation against backdrop of Ukrainian conflict

More threats to Internet freedom and broadcast media pluralism

Russia continues to adopt draconian legislation at a breakneck pace. A series of laws signed by President Putin on the night of 8 July after being rushed through the Duma have further eroded freedom of information by reinforcing government control of the Internet and directly threatening pay TV.

“By approving these latest repressive laws without any real debate and without respecting its own procedures, the Duma has again displayed a complete contempt for the Russian people and the role a parliament is supposed to play,” said Johann Bihr, the head of the Reporters Without Borders Eastern Europe and Central Asia desk.

“Continuing the trend of the past two years and coming at a time when control of information is at the heart of the conflict in Ukraine, these laws constitute a grave attack on media pluralism, Internet freedom and the constitutional right to freedom of expression.”

Pay TV channels in danger

Advertising will be banned on pay TV channels and other channels whose signal must be decoded. According to TV industry sources, this ban will jeopardize the survival of about half of the approximately 300 channels concerned.

The official grounds for the ban – to create a level playing field between pay TV and free channels – makes no sense. The leading free TV channels have no income from subscribers but they are heavily subsidized by the state and already have 97 per cent of the advertising market.

The law banning advertising on pay TV was passed in record time. Submitted on 24 June, it was passed on first reading on 1 July, passed on second and third readings on 4 July and was promulgated 5 days later. Pay TV companies were given no chance to voice their objections and the haste is reflected in the law’s wording, which is vague and ambiguous.

Even more troubling is the fact that on 3 July the parliamentary committee in charge of the bill postponed the second and third readings until after the summer break, but changed its mind a few hours later. When the committee met a second time to put the bill back on the agenda, it did not have a quorum because only four legislators were present.

The bill was nonetheless approved in plenary session the next day, with only members of the ruling United Russia party voting in favour and without the Duma having received all the required opinions.

Some share parliamentarian Ilya Ponomarev’s view that “the way this law was voted suggests that it came from the president’s office.” Others point to broadcasting giants such as Gazprom-Media, which supports the government. It is one of the main beneficiaries of the law, which also abolishes the limit of 35 per cent of the advertising market for any one company.

This amendment will reinforce the hold of Gazprom-Media and another giant, Vi, over the advertising market and increase their ability to pressure TV channels.

As the leading free TV channels such as Rossiya, Pervy Kanal and NTV are largely under Kremlin control, the expected demise of many pay TV channels is likely to have a major effect on what is left of Russian TV pluralism. The advertising ban is an additional threat to Dozhd TV, the independent station that has already been throttled by its exclusion from most cable and satellite TV offerings. It has just relinquished its Moscow studios to the pro-government TV channel LifeNews.

This law is an unexpected gift for the leading free TV channels at a time when they are swamping the Russian public with propaganda about the Ukrainian conflict. Competition from pay TV channels, whose content is often more targeted or thematic, had contributed to a fall in the audience share of Rossiya, Pervy Kanal and NTV from 58 to 40 per cent in the past 11 years.

Internet under closer control

Criticizing Crimea’s annexation could now be very costly. “Public appeals for actions violating the Russian Federation’s territorial integrity” had already been a crime since December 2013. An amendment approved on 4 July has increased the maximum sentence to four years in prison, or five if the media or Internet is used to make the appeal.

President Putin also promulgated amendments on 30 June under which the penalties for “appeals for extremism” are extended to the Internet. The legislation on extremism was already applied to online comments in practice, so the new amendments just make this explicit and, by making Internet use an aggravating circumstance, increase the maximum sentence from four years to five.

The amendments are mainly designed to send an additional intimidatory signal to Internet users. “There is nothing new here,” the well-known blogger Anton Nosik said. “The whole idea is to create fear and the desire to go and hide somewhere or go to bed without drawing attention to oneself.” Lawyer Galina Arapova added: “They are making it clear to us what dissidents risk. They want all debate confined to the kitchen.”

A new device for identifying “extremist” web pages is another sources of concern. The media regulatory authority Roskomnadzor recently acquired a system that automatically uses keywords to detect potentially problematic content.

Russia’s broadly and loosely worded legislation on extremism has long been a source of concern because it lends itself to political use to silence critics and encourage self-censorship.

Under another hastily adopted and disturbing law, all companies gathering, processing or storing the personal data of Russian citizens will be required to do so on servers located in Russia from September 2016 onwards. The extent of this law’s feasibility is questionable, inasmuch as many daily activities – using an operating system such as Windows, buying something online or using GPS – involve personal data stored abroad.

It will nonetheless allow the authorities to consolidate their control over the Internet. The generalized surveillance system SORM already gives them the means to access any content on Russian servers or any communications passing through them, but the Internet giants such as Facebook, Twitter and Google escaped their control.

The Kremlin will now be able to negotiate with them from a position of strength. Online services that do not comply with the law could be placed on a special register so that Roskomnadzor blocks access to them. As Internet entrepreneur Andrei Mima said: “It has nothing to do with protecting data and everything to do with extending the blacklist to any site storing data outside Russia.”

Despite the potential threats to the Russian economy, this law was also adopted in record time. It was submitted to the Duma on 24 June and was voted on 4 July. The Russian digital industry’s leading representatives, who have voiced their concern, were given no time to submit proposals or recommendations.

The laws approved on 4 July were still awaiting endorsement by the Federation Council (the upper house) when Putin promulgated on the night of 8 July.