Vladislav Zdolnikov, owner of TgVPN, filed a lawsuit against Roskomnadzor

Yesterday it became known that the owner of the proxy service for the Telegram TgVPN, Vladislav Zdolnikov, filed a lawsuit against Roskomnadzor. The plaintiff asks the court to recognize the blocking of the IP addresses used by its service as illegal, according to Vedomosti. Zdolnikov’s rights are defended by Roskomsvoboda’s lawyer Sarkis Darbinyan.

As it turned out, the lawsuit was filed with the Moscow Arbitration Court on June 13. True, it was not personally Zdolnikov who filed it, but the Private Networks company, registered in Scotland, which is the actual owner of TgVPN. The document states that the proxy service received a notice of blocking from Roskomnadzor on the same day that Telegram was also blocked.

The plaintiff is opposed to what the agency called the distribution of prohibited information as the reason for the blocking. In turn, representatives of Roskomnadzor state that IP-addresses belonging to the proxy service found materials calling for extremist activity, as well as materials in support of Syrian armed groups that are banned in Russia.

According to Zdolnikov, there was nothing on all blocked IPs, except for the official business card site tgvpn.com. These IPs perform a purely technical function and if someone tries to access them, then such a user will receive just a blank page.

Last year Zdolnikov colleagues appealedto the Investigation Committee, stating that officials of the Ministry of Communications and Roskomnadzor should be brought to justice in three articles of the Criminal Code at once (293, 285 and 306). The reason for the appeal is the presence of holes in the lock system of Roskomnadzor, which allowed blocking any resource in the Russian Federation.