VLADIMIR KHARITONOV v. RUSSIA JUDGMENT provider. Both the website owner and the hosting service provider were non-Russian legal entities and could not have been expected to comply with demands by the Russian authorities. The existing provisions of Russian law offered no protection to owners of law-compliant websites which happened to have the same IP address as those with unlawful content. The law did not require Roskomnadzor to assess the impact of its blocking decision on such websites. (b) The Government 25. The Government submitted that the blocking of the offending website, rastaman.tales.ru, had pursued an important policy objective, namely to restrict information about the manufacture and use of drugs. The telecoms regulator, Roskomnadzor, had not immediately entered the offending website’s IP address in the register of banned websites. First, it had notified the hosting service provider, in Russian and English, that the website contained unlawful information. Only after the provider had failed to remove the offending information, five days later, had Roskomnadzor added the website’s IP address to the Integrated Register. The way in which Roskomnadzor had proceeded had been in strict compliance with subsection 9 of section 15.1 of the Information Act and constituted a legal, justified and necessary measure. The law did not require Roskomnadzor to notify owners of all websites which shared an IP address with a blocked website. They could check the existence of restrictions by filling in a form on the Integrated Register’s website. 26. In the Government’s submission, the fact that the hosting service provider had been given prior notification and that the blocking order had been implemented by private ISPs distinguished the present case from the case of Ahmet Yıldırım v. Turkey (no. 3111/10, ECHR 2012). In that case, the Turkish criminal court had not informed Google before blocking its hosting services and the blocking order had been applied directly by the State telecoms directorate. In the present case, the applicant had not brought proceedings against the ISP, requesting the court to assess whether the blocking of the IP address was the only method available for restricting access to the offending website. The Government contended that, unlike Russia, Turkey had banned thousands of websites, including popular services such as YouTube, GeoCities and Dailymotion (they referred to Cengiz and Others v. Turkey, nos. 48226/10 and 14027/11, ECHR 2015 (extracts), which concerned the blocking of YouTube). 27. The Government submitted that the applicant was not a victim of the alleged violation, in the same way as a Turkish user of a music-streaming website had been merely indirectly affected by the blocking of that website (they referred to Akdeniz v. Turkey (dec.), no. 20877/10, 11 March 2014). The applicant could have carried on publishing information about the electronic book industry on other websites, platforms and online resources, 8

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