BULGAKOV v. RUSSIA JUDGMENT RELEVANT DOMESTIC LEGAL FRAMEWORK A. Information Act (Federal Law no. 149-FZ of 27 July 2006) 10. Section 2 defines the basic terms as follows: “(13) ’Internet site’ is an aggregate of computer software and other content ... which can be accessed ... by its domain name or its network address ... (14) ’page of an Internet site (webpage)’ is a part of an Internet site which can be accessed by its reference made up of the domain name and additional characters ...”. 11. Section 10 provides that information may be freely disseminated in the Russian Federation subject to the requirements of Russian legislation (subsection (1)). The dissemination of information which may not be disseminated under penalty of criminal or administrative sanction is prohibited (subsection (6)). B. Case-law of Russian courts 12. By a judgment of 10 May 2011 (case no. 58-Vpr11-2), the Supreme Court of the Russian Federation reversed judgments rendered by the lower courts on a prosecutor’s public-interest claim against an ISP. The prosecutor had sought a court order blocking access to a particular website, two pages of which contained documentation of a prohibited political party, by means of “adding filter rules for the website’s IP address to the area border router”. The lower courts at two instances had dismissed the prosecutor’s claim, having found that the ISP had no technical means of blocking access to individual pages of the website and that there were no legal grounds for blocking access to the entire website. The Supreme Court disagreed. It held that the ISP was bound, under section 10(6) of the Information Act, to block the dissemination of extremist content. In so far as it had a technical possibility to enforce the wholesale blocking of the website’s IP address by defining filter rules at the area border router, the ISP should have used that method to block access to the website. 13. On 13 March 2012 the Sakhalin Regional Court reversed a judgment by the Town Court dismissing a town prosecutor’s claim against an ISP (case no. 33630/2012). The prosecutor had sought a court order blocking access to a website containing an extremist film. The Town Court had held that, in the absence of evidence that no content other than the prohibited film was housed at that IP address, blocking access to the website’s IP address could breach the users’ right to freedom of access to legitimate content. The Regional Court reiterated the Supreme Court’s arguments and remitted the matter to the Town Court, requiring it to examine whether access to the website could be blocked by filtering its IP address at the area border router. 14. On 17 November 2014 the Rostov Regional Court upheld a judgment by the District Court dismissing a district prosecutor’s claim seeking to have one page of an extremist publication blocked “by way of filtering the website’s IP address at the area border router” (case no. 33-15382/2014). The District Court had refused the claim on the grounds that filtering the website’s IP address would restrict access to the entire website, rather than to a page of the website. 3