YEREVAN. - Internet users in Armenia should not fall victim to the Russian censorship, Sarkis Darbinyan, leading lawyer at the Russian public project Roscomsvoboda told Armenian News – NEWS.am. According to him, limitations to free Internet access are unjustified and must be disputed.  

Over 300,000 network resources have already been included in Russian Roskomnadzor’s (the Federal Service for Supervision in the Sphere of Telecom, Information Technologies and Mass Communications) register of banned websites. The websites banned merely for their content are actually few. Most of them were blocked only because their IP-addresses coincided with those of the banned ones, he said.

“And IPv4 protocol, which is used by over 95% of Runet, allows “hanging” thousands of websites on one IP, but Roskomnadzor ignores this fact,” Darbinyan said.

Access to the banned websites is also blocked by operators of the main Internet channels, namely Rostelecom and Beeline. Consequently, the users of other countries experience the problems of the Russian censorship, he said.

According to Darbinyan, a bill on blocking online poker websites and pharmacies is currently being drawn up in Russia. To the question whether this has to do with the lack of licenses, Darbinyan said: “People just want to give licenses and make money on that.”

Websites selling grey market goods are also under threat. Referring to the comment on the necessity of transparent documentation of goods, Darbinyan said: “We deal with the protection of network resources regardless of their legal relations with state authorities.”