News

Foreign IT giants are obliged to open branches in Russia.

Large foreign companies operating on the Internet on the territory of Russia with a daily audience of more than 500 thousand Russian users are obliged to create representative offices or establish a Russian legal entity. Federal Law No. 236-FZ dd 01.07.2021 was signed by Vladimir Putin and published.

The Federal Service for Supervision of Communications, Information Technologies and Mass Communications will publish a list of such foreign companies on its website. Facebook, TikTok, Instagram, Twitter, some video hosting services, for example, YouTube, are included in the pre-compiled list of 20 platforms: social networks (Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Twitter), hosting providers (Amazon, Digital Ocean, Cloudflare, GoDaddy), messengers (WhatsApp, Telegram, Viber), mail service (Gmail), search engines (Google, Bing.com), online stores (Aliexpress.com, Ikea.com, Iherb.com), and Wikipedia.org. However, the list can be adjusted later.

The types of measures to urge the specified foreign companies to comply with the legislation of the Russian Federation are established. They include:

  • prohibition on the distribution of advertising of such a foreign company as an object of advertising;
  • prohibition on the distribution of advertising on the information resource of a foreign company;
  • restriction of money transfers and acceptance of payments;
  • prohibition of search results, collection and cross-border transfer of personal data;
  • partial or complete restriction of access to the information resource of a foreign company.