Roskomnadzor sends notices to take down information from payment service sites

The Russian Federal Service for Supervision of Communications, Information Technology and Mass Media (Roskomnadzor) sent a letter to operators of the QIWI and Skrill payment services, requesting to remove from the web sites information on contractors that use these payment services.

A Roskomnadzor representative informed that certain pages of the payment system sites contain links to Internet casinos and provide an opportunity to transfer money to bookmakers.

At the same time, under Federal Law No.244 dated 29.12.2006, which regulates activity on arranging and conducting gambling, using the Internet for such purposes is prohibited, with the exception of stakes being accepted by centers for recordkeeping of transfers of interactive stakes. That said, such centers can only be established by self-regulating organizations of gambling organizers and must act in line with the Federal Law “On banks and banking activity.”

Therefore, by sending such notices to payment system operators, Roskomnadzor is acting under the powers granted to it under Article 15.1 of Federal Law No.149-FZ “On information, information technology and on protection of information” dated 27.07.2006 on restricting access to sites containing banned information.

To fulfill Roskomnadzor’s instructions and to avoid the domain names and network addresses being entered into the unified register of Internet resources containing information banned in the Russian Federation, the QIWI and Skrill payment services deleted the banned information.

Earlier, Roskomnadzor already entered Internet resources into the register for publishing information on gambling. In June 2016, Roskomnadzor blocked the gambling page on the Amazon S3 cloud service’s site on request of the Russian Federal Tax Service. In addition, web sites of many foreign Internet casinos and bookmakers currently cannot be accessed in Russia.