State Duma once again trying to limit access of Russians to independent information on the Internet. To do this, the deputies decided to use a five-year-old bill that was never adopted, originally aimed at regulating news aggregators. However, now an amendment has been added to it, prohibiting the dissemination of information about ways to bypass Internet blocking.

The initiative was initiated by Anton Gorelkin, State Duma deputy from the United Russia faction. According to him, this is not a ban. VPN, but only about avoiding advertising workarounds. However, experts fear that in practice this could lead to a complete blocking of VPN services and other tools to maintain access to blocked resources.

In addition, the bill introduces a number of additional restrictions. In particular, it obliges Russian enterprises and institutions to use the services of hosting providers from a special registry supervised by Roskomnadzor. These providers will have to promptly comply with any instructions of the department, otherwise they may be excluded from the register and lose the opportunity to provide their services in the country.

According to experts, these measures are aimed at further “sovereignization” of the Russian Internet and control over information flows. And the ban on information about bypassing blocking will actually deprive Russians of access to reliable tools for protecting privacy on the network.

“The hunt for VPNs has already begun in the gray zone, and now regime warriors like Deputy Gorelkin are trying to legitimize all this retroactively and introduce a complete legal ban on the use of armor-piercing information protection systems and restoring access to information,” said Sargis Darbinyan, a leading lawyer at the human rights organization Roskomsvoboda.

Thus, the deputies are once again trying to limit the Internet in Russia and deprive people of free access to information. While experts openly oppose the initiative, ordinary citizens can only wait and hope for the best.