By Vestnik Kavkaza
The head of the State Duma Committee on Family, Women, and Child Affairs, Yelena Mizulina, who initiated adoption of the law on prohibition of gay-propaganda, shifted from gays to swearing people. Mizulina suggested banning of Internet resources for obscene words. It concerns websites and certain pages of users in social nets. According to Mizulina, it will protect children from swearing. However, the Ministry of Communication and Media rejected banning websites for swearing on their pages.
“Swearing takes place on Internet, just like in whole our life, because the Internet is an indissoluble part part of it; and it is difficult to separate the Internet as a technological field, rather than life around us.” Arseny Nedyak, the deputy head of the Department of State Policy for the Mass Media of the Ministry of Communications and Media of Russia, explains. “We try to minimize launching any grounds for banning information resources, technological banning, elimination of information, banning information, and banning users. We believe that banning is the last resort. This measure can sooner or later influence the integrity of the Internet, as the net cannot be permanently banned. Just as the hard driver of a computer or a laptop, if it is constantly fixed, renewed, and programs are being installed, sooner or later the hardware will break. If banning is constantly provided for various reasons, the same fate will await the Internet.”
According to Nedyak, “banning should be provided for “absolute evil” – child pornography, drugs, and extremism. Of course, these directions must be banned. However, we believe that it is senseless to extend the reasons for banning; at least any new reasons for banning should at first be widely discussed in society with the participation of all branch companies, structures, interested players, representatives of Internet companies, providers, and so on.”
“There are two kinds of banning,” Ruslan Gattarov, a member of the Federation Council Committee for Science, Education, Culture, and Information Policy, states. “If you ban a domain name, a whole social net is banned, rather than a certain blog or a page. And the second technical option of banning is banning ip. Everybody knows that one IP can have several dozens of websites; and when we ban an IP, we ban well-doing websites.
According to Gattarov, “to fulfill the so-called law on blacklists, to ban absolute evil – child porno, everything about spreading drugs and propaganda of suicide, the Federal Supervision Agency for Information Technologies and Communications has to do it by hand. Sometimes well-doing websites are banned, but there are few such cases because it is done by hand. As for swearing, we should fight against swearing on the net, but not by such means. It’s like we want to kill insects and use a nuclear weapon. Yes, insects will die, but a lot of good things will die together with them. The banning of websites should be the last resort, a state instrument against dangerous phenomena recognized by the society – the three I have mentioned above.”
