VLADIMIR KHARITONOV v. RUSSIA JUDGMENT B. Merits 1. Submissions by the parties (a) The applicant 22. The applicant accepted that the blocking of access to information about the production and use of drugs could have pursued a legitimate aim. However, the scope and manner of the interference had been disproportionate to that aim. “The Rastaman Tales” was a crowd-sourced collection of comic and folk stories about cannabis. It targeted an adult audience and could not be compared to a practical guide on the manufacture or use of drugs. The stories had been published many times in book format and nominated for a prestigious Russian literary award. Indeed, after the website had been blocked, it had been legally sold in paper form for many years and remained available from multiple sources on the Internet. The authorities’ decision to block access to one of many copies of the collection had failed to achieve the aim they had set out to achieve and had also caused substantial and unjustified damage to the applicant’s right to freedom to impart information. 23. The applicant pointed out that he had used his website to publish news, which was, in the Court’s words, “a perishable commodity” losing its value and interest in the event of delayed publication, even for a short period (he referred to Observer and Guardian v. the United Kingdom, 26 November 1991, § 60, Series A no. 216). By the time the blocking measure had been taken, his website had existed for four years; it had been indexed by search engines and enjoyed a steady readership. Moving to a different platform would have involved a dip in the number of readers and investment of considerable time and resources. It would also have cut off access to the website’s four-year archive of publications. Most importantly, structural defects in the Russian Internet law made it entirely possible that any alternative platform would be subject to a similar wholesale blocking order for reasons unconnected to the applicant and outside his control. The Russian authorities had publicly stated many times that they were prepared to block Facebook and Google; as of October 2017, over 3,900,000 websites, which did not have any illegal content but shared an IP address with others that did, were blocked in Russia. 24. The blocking decision had not been produced in the domestic proceedings – the courts had rejected his disclosure request in that respect – and the Government had not submitted it to the Court, either. He had in no way been connected to the offending website or Internet service provider (ISP) and could not have been aware of any steps they might have taken for the protection of their rights. As a good-faith website owner he had been at the mercy of three actors, over which he had had no leverage: the Russian authorities, the owner of the offending website, and the hosting service 7