BULGAKOV v. RUSSIA JUDGMENT distinguishing a particular page of the website from the website as a whole. The unsettled case-law of the Russian courts may lend support to his hypothesis. There have been cases in which lower courts correctly determined that blocking access to a website’s IP address would lead to arbitrary blocking of legitimate content on the same website. Some such decisions were overturned on appeal, whereas others were upheld (see paragraphs 12 to 14 above). The fact however remains that this blocking method has been used in thousands of cases (see paragraph 15 above). 34. The Court reiterates that the wholesale blocking of access to an entire website is an extreme measure which has been compared to banning a newspaper or television station (see paragraphs 17 and 19 above). Such a measure deliberately disregards the distinction between the legal and illegal information the website may contain, and renders inaccessible large amounts of content which has not been designated as illegal. Blocking access to a website’s IP address has the practical effect of extending the scope of the blocking order far beyond the illegal content which had originally been targeted (compare Ahmet Yıldırım, cited above, § 63). Such an extension did not have a legal basis in the circumstances of the present case. Section 10 of the Information Act allowed the authorities to target content that was proscribed under administrative or criminal law, rather than an entire website. The blocking formula employed by the District Court did not feature in any primary legislation or implementing regulations. The Government, in their observations, did not point to any legal provision on which the method of implementation chosen by the District Court could have been based. 35. Turning next to the issue of the safeguards which domestic legislation must provide to protect individuals from the excessive and arbitrary effects of blocking measures, the Court notes that the Russian law did not require any form of involvement of the website owner, such as the applicant, in blocking proceedings conducted under section 10(6) of the Information Act. The prosecutor’s application for a blocking order had been prepared without advance notification to the parties whose rights and interests were likely to be affected. The applicant had not been informed of the prosecutor’s application or afforded the opportunity to remove the illegal content before the application was lodged with the court. The District Court had not invited him to intervene in the proceedings or to make submissions, treating the matter as being between the prosecutor and the local ISP. 36. The Court finds that the participation of a local ISP as the designated defendant was not sufficient to bestow an adversarial character on the proceedings. The ISP provides technology enabling users to access millions of websites it knows nothing about. It does not have the same detailed knowledge of their contents as their owners do; nor does it have the legal resources required to mount a vigorous defence of every targeted website. The ISP has no vested interest in the outcome of the proceedings. Blocking orders have no incidence on its connectivity business; they are enforceable not just against the defendant ISP but, once final, they acquire universal effect requiring all Russian ISPs to implement blocking measures. The Court finds that the blocking proceedings which were conducted in the applicant’s absence were not adversarial in nature and did not provide a forum in which the interested parties could have been heard. 37. In the proceedings which the applicant instituted to challenge the blocking measure, the domestic courts did not apply the Plenary Supreme Court’s Ruling no. 21 of 27 June 2013, which required them to have regard to the criteria established 10