The State Duma immediately adopted amendments in the second and third readings that will oblige bloggers and owners of Telegram channels with at least 10 thousand subscribers to transfer their data to Roskomnadzor.
According to the project, the authors of such blogs will be required to transfer to Roskomnadzor “information that allows them to be identified,” not to repost bloggers who are not in the register, and not to publish information prohibited in Russia.
Social networks were required to provide Roskomnadzor with data about account owners, label bloggers who are participants in the registry, and limit access to pages whose creators have not registered there.
In addition to restricting access, authors of large blogs who not in the Roskomnadzor database, it will be prohibited to place advertisements and provide links to donations.
Initially, the project dealt with a different topic — the limit on the number of SIM cards that can be sold to one person. Foreigners were allowed to have up to 10 SIM cards, and Russian citizens — up to 20. One of the authors of the project, Alexander Khinshtein, made amendments about bloggers before the second reading.
In 2014, the State Duma and Roskomnadzor already tried to oblige bloggers whose pages were visited by more than 3 thousand people a day to register. However, in 2017, the RKN stopped maintaining the register, which at that time contained more than two thousand entries. The fines and bans provided for by law for non-compliance with the rules were not applied to bloggers at that time.