Google has been fined by a Russian court for insufficiently filtering content banned in the country.
According to Zulfiya Gurinchuk, the press secretary of the court of the Tagansky district of Russian capital Moscow, the company has been fined 1,500,000 RUB (15,700 GBP) for failing to stop issuing information about information resources, information and telecommunication networks, access to which is restricted in Russian law.
This is the third fine that the company has received for violating this legislation. Google was fined 500,000 RUB (5,230 GBP) in November, 2018, for refusing to connect to the register of sites banned in the Russian Federation to filter search results. The company was also fined in July, 2019 for 700,000 RUB (7,320 GBP) for not deleting about a third of the links from the register of prohibited information.
At the end of September, 2019, the head of Roskomnadzor, the Federal Service for Supervision of Communications, Information Technology and Mass Media told reporters that Google was taking measures to improve filtering of content prohibited in the Russian Federation. In November, 2019, the department noted that Google increased the level of filtering search results from prohibited information to 80%.
The law obliging search engines to connect to the federal state information system (FSIS), which contains a list of prohibited sites (Unified Register of Prohibited Information), came into force on September 26, 2018. At the same time, Roskomnadzor sent requests to connect to the FSIS to Google, Yandex LLC, Sputnik LLC and Mail.Ru LLC. By the end of October, everyone except Google had connected to the FSIS and did not give out links to prohibited sites in search results.
