The law on news aggregators entered into force on January 1, 2017, but Roskomnadzor took care of the calculation of the audience of these services only now. Companies claim that they already comply with the requirements of the document. What will happen to Google News, why Yandex abandoned state sites and how the new law will work – in the material of Gazeta.Ru.
Roskomnadzor requested data on the attendance of news sites
Roskomnadzor prepared a list of news aggregators who need to provide data on their daily attendance until February 21. The notifications were sent on February 10 at Yandex.NOSTRIS, Google News, News Mail.ru, Rambler/News, Media 2 and Microsoft Network (MSN).
“After the analysis and verification of the information provided about attendance, aggregators who visit more than one million users per day will have to provide information to Roskomnadzor to identify the owner of the news aggregator,” the department said.
The companies as a whole are already ready for the law “On news aggregators”, which entered into force on January 1, 2017.
“We work in the jurisdiction of the Russian Federation and comply with all the requirements of the legislation. At the moment, the service fully complies with the law on news aggregators, ”said Matvey Alekseev, director of external communications of the Rambler CO group of companies. The attendance of the resource is not disclosed.
In Yandex, Russian laws were prepared at the end of 2016. Open statistics It is indicated that the average daily audience of the service is 6 million users.
“We comply with the requirements of the law that entered into force. We interact with Roskomnadzor in a working order, ”the press service of Mail.ru Group said. Statistics The company is also open and demonstrates that the daily attendance of the service is from 3.5 million to 5 million users.
The News Service is administered by Google Inc. If a request was received at the head office of the company, then colleagues will provide an answer in the framework of existing procedures, ”the Google press service answered.
Media 2 aggregator is also ready for the law. “As for attendance, we really fall under the law on aggregators, as we are read significantly more than a million unique users per day,” the general director of the service Anna Ivanova told us Gazeta.ru. She added that in general, the work of the aggregator will not change much, as well as the composition of partners, since 90% of cooperating publications are registered in Roskomnadzor. “At the moment, those media that did not have a license, in the process of its receipt, and as for the famous branded media that will not receive a license, most likely we will continue to work with them, but we can limit the content of the content only those topics that are not They contradict the legislation of the Russian Federation, ”Ivanova shared.
Microsoft refused comments.
Law without bloggers
The law on the features of the dissemination of information by news agenchers was adopted in the summer of 2016.
Those, as the deputies decided, are resources for the collection, processing and distribution of information with a daily audience of more than 1 million people.
If for three months the number of users does not exceed 1 million, then at the request of the owner the aggregator may be excluded from the registry. Roskomnadzor can also remove the aggregator from the registry without a statement by the owner, if an insufficient number of users visits the resource within six months.
The document also states that owners of news aggregators should check the reliability of socially significant information before its distribution and delete it according to the regulator’s instruction.
According to the new law, the owner of the resource is responsible for the content of news publications if they are not officially registered media.
For non -fulfillment of the requirements of Roskomnadzor, companies are threatened with fines. Despite the fact that the market participants managed to reduce the minimum bar for the first violation – from 800 thousand to 600 thousand rubles, fines for legal entities look impressive. For repeated non -fulfillment, the company can be fined from 1.5 million to 3 million rubles.
In order to avoid incorrect interpretations, which the owners of the aggregators feared at the stage of developing the bill, Roskomnadzor at the end of 2016 explained on his website some provisions of the Federal Law “On News Aggregators”.
The department, in particular, will not consider social networks, blogs, television channels and sites with a news feed.
Representatives of Roskomnadzor noted that the owner of the aggregator is enough to store information about the source of information, and not the news themselves.
The stateites passed by
The Yandex.NOSISS service had to quickly respond and change the conditions for cooperation with its partners. The basic requirements of the company remained unchanged, but legal additions were introduced.
In particular, from the main positions of the resource, the portals of the Committee publishing houses (TJournal, VC.ru, DTF) and Lookatmedia (The Village, Wonderzine and Furfur), as well as the online Media, yes, are transformer, and Sports.ru . A new requirement and foreign news resources affected.
In addition, from the aggregator at the end of December 2016, the sites of government agencies disappeared, which did not sign a new agreement and did not send copies of documents.
“In the light of the requirements of the law, the procedure for working news aggregators with official sites remains opaque. Formal criteria for determining the status of official sites do not always correlate with the real state of affairs, and the news aggregator will not be able to independently reliably determine their belonging and status, ”Gazeta.Ru was told in Yandex.
The company recalled that the media has a single register, and there are currently no similar list for the sites of government agencies. “Given all these ambiguities, it is possible that additional explanations or amendments to the laws will be required,” the company noted.
How to count Google
If with Russian companies it is more or less clear, then the intrigue remains around Google. It is still unknown whether the company's service is subject to the new Russian law.
In the summer VedomostiReferring to TNS statistics (the current MediaScope) wrote that Google News in Russia was visiting only 92 thousand people daily.
The press secretary of Roskomnadzor Vadim Ampelonsky then indicated that the department did not even evaluate the statistics of a service. At the time of preparation of this material, they did not share fresh information in Roskomnadzor. Ampelonsky noted that the companies have a term before the end of the day (February 21).