The State Duma has introduced a bill on the "landing" of foreign IT companies in Russia, obliging large foreign Internet companies to open official representative offices in the territory of the Russian Federation.
The bill provides that the owners of information resources with a daily audience of more than 500 thousand Russian users will have to create branches or open representative offices in the Russian Federation, or establish Russian legal entities that must fully represent the interests of the parent companies and be the main channel of interaction of Russian regulators with them in Russia. Such responsibilities also apply to hosting providers, advertising system operators, and organizers of information dissemination on the Internet.
The co-author of the bill, Deputy Alexander Khinshtein , explains that if the law is adopted, a global company that falls under its action must create a "branch, representative office or authorized legal entity" in the Russian Federation; register a personal account on the Roskomnadzor website; publish an electronic form for feedback from Russian citizens and organizations "on its resource".
The opening of Russian branches of global companies should promote, in particular, equal conditions of competition with local market participants, who bear the costs associated with the creation and operation of the company. But the main reason for the inequality of global and Russian companies in the Russian market is that the latter are obliged to comply with and comply with domestic legislation, and global players try to ignore it, hiding behind a " corporate veil ".
This is the name given to a situation where a global company creates a local enterprise that actually represents its interests, but lacks independence in decision-making. Such an enterprise refuses to be responsible for the actions of a global company under the laws of the country.
Google has been systematically resorting to this technique in Russia for at least the last six years. The first precedent of removing the corporate veil has been created The Moscow City Court's decision in the case "Anton Burkov v. Google" in 2015, when the court considered that Google LLC should independently and under Russian laws be responsible for Google's business in Russia.
In January 2021, the European Court of Justice recommended removing the "corporate veil" from global IT companies.
The draft law on the "landing" of global IT companies in Russia provides for the following additional measures to compel compliance with Russian legislation:
- informing the users of the information resource about the violation of the legislation of the Russian Federation;
- prohibition on the distribution of advertising about an information resource;
- prohibition on advertising distribution on an information resource;
- prohibition on making payments to an internet resource;
- ban on search results;
- prohibition on the collection and cross-border transfer of personal data;
- partial or complete restriction of access to an information resource.