New bill: news aggregators should be responsible for the accuracy of the content, similar to traditional media (UPD)

    On Wednesday, a bill was introduced in the State Duma that introduces a special legal regime for "news aggregators" - Internet resources with traffic of more than 1 million per day that collect, process and disseminate information.

    The registry of such resources will be maintained by Roskomnadzor. The project obliges news aggregators to “verify the reliability of publicly relevant information disseminated”. For the publication of false information, an extrajudicial “adoption of measures to suppress the distribution of false information” is provided for by a complaint of the authorized bodies.

    The news aggregator must be a Russian legal entity. The share of foreign capital in it should not exceed 20%. 6 months are given to bring the company structure in line with the new requirements.

    The company will have to keep published information for six months.

    For refusing to delete inaccurate information at the request of Roskomnadzor, the news aggregator will be required to pay a fine - from 400 thousand rubles for individuals and up to 5 million rubles for legal entities.

    According to one of the authors of the project, Aleksey Kazakov (Just Russia faction), “news aggregators” should “take responsibility” for information: either reprint authoritative media that verify the information, or be responsible for reprinting. “Aggregators are superior to the media in influence. But we don’t want to create conditions for them to work uncomfortably, therefore we give the right to apply to Roskomnadzor only to relevant departments, and not to citizens, ” he told Kommersant.

    Member of the Communist Party faction Alexander Yushchenko confirmed to the publication that he was introducing the bill to the State Duma together with Mr. Kazakov. He referred to sociological research, according to which about 60% of users get news not through traditional media, but in search programs and aggregators. “Such resources determine the news agenda by ranking the news. This function requires the same responsibility as the media, ”he believes. Indeed, the inaccuracy of information can be associated with the “biased news posting” in the tops. In addition, according to him, foreign social networks Twitter, Facebook in other countries are already testing their own news services, so this activity requires regulation by Russian laws.

    According to a source in the State Duma, up to 30 large companies will fall under the project: Yandex, Mail.ru, Google, Rambler, VKontakte, Sputnik, Facebook, Twitter and others.
    49.8% of Mail.ru shares are held by holders of global depositary receipts, which are traded on the LSE; 27.6% - with MIH Mail Investment Company BV (owned by the South African media holding Naspers); 15.2% - in New Media and Technology Investment LP and its affiliates; 7.4% - from the Chinese investment company Tencent.

    The press service of Yandex told Kommersant that the Yandex.News service simply could not exist if the work of checking the news were assigned to the resource. “Every day, Yandex.News indexes more than 100 thousand news messages from almost 7 thousand sources. Yandex.News does not have an editorial office, the service automatically collects messages from partners and in the same form displays their headers and fragments. Yandex news aggregator does not publish full texts of news - readers follow links to partner sites.
    The main shareholder is the head of the Yandex group of companies Arkady Volozh, his voting share is 39.81%, economic - 10.84%, another 7% of the votes and 4% of the capital is owned by Yandex employee Vladimir Ivanov. The investor of the company, the Baring Vostok group of funds, which manage, among other things, the pension and university money of the USA, countries of Western Europe and Asia, has 15.55% of the vote and 4.69% of the capital.

    It turns out that for Internet aggregators it is proposed to establish the same rules as for media with foreign capital. In October 2014, President Vladimir Putin signed a decree amending the law on the media.
    According to new amendments, since January 2016, foreigners are forbidden to directly or indirectly own more than 20% of any Russian media. Therefore, now foreign investors can either leave the Russian market or reorganize the business so that it meets the new requirements.

    In addition, in 2014, the “law on bloggers” already obliged authors of Internet resources with an attendance of “over 3 thousand users per day” to register with Roskomnadzor and imposed a number of restrictions on the content of the resources.

    Update: Interfax has just reported that the Ministry of Communications has opposed a bill that equates news aggregators with the media.

    “We have not seen this bill, we haven’t officially received it, and we don’t like this idea,” said Russian Deputy Minister of Telecom and Mass Communications Alexei Volin. According to him, the authors of the project did not conduct any consultations with the Ministry of Communications. In connection with this, a contradiction arose: Roskomnadzor was declared in the bill as a controlling body, but it is controlled by the Ministry of Communications.

    “We believe that if this idea is brought to its logical end, then newsstands can be equated with the media with the same success. But we see the covers of newspapers and magazines in the window of the kiosk and we can read the news headlines on them - why not a news aggregator? ”Commented Volin.

    Advisor to the President for Internet Development German Klimenko commented on the situation to the publication of RBC:
    This is an old story, it has been discussed for about two years now. Perhaps they will refuse it. I had a news aggregator MediaMetrix, which I gave to my son. I have always believed that news aggregators are a new form of media. Do I need to license them as media, I do not know.

    It seems to me that Facebook is difficult to fit into the definition of an aggregator. Aggregators that collect traffic like MediaMetrix are probably the modern types of media. But it is difficult to say whether they need licensing or not.

    As far as I know, Yandex only displays news from licensed media in the aggregator. And why additionally licensing materials that are issued by media with a license is not clear.

    Spokesman for the Russian President Dmitry Peskov believes that rushing with a decision is not worth it:
    First, this [this question] needs to be worked out. With some dashing cast, of course, it would hardly be right to solve such complex topics. There are different points of view, and quite reasoned. Simplifying this topic would be counterintuitive.
    And the official comment by Yandex.

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