Deutsche Welle: Forbidden Bynet to be launched in September

Any websites, undesirable for the state ideological machine, can be put on the “black list” in Belarus.

To implement decree #60, the Belarusian State Telecommunication Inspection at the Ministry of Communication and Informatization opened sections on its website containing lists of Internet resources with restricted access, Deutsche Welle informs.

Autumn is time of black lists harvest

On closer examination it turned out that there are at least two lists of forbidden Bynet, a public one and the other one for Internet service providers (ISP). The first black list will be available for download for any Internet user. The list doesn’t contain any websites now.

This is not strange, because the regulation on the Belarusian Internet segment obliges to put access restricting system into operation and provide its effective work only by September 1.

Thus, Belarus will feel the restricted access to certain Internet resources in full only at the beginning of the new academic year. It should be noticed that the presidential campaign starts in Belarus in autumn, too.

By the way, the service of access restricting provided for by decree #60 will be rendered to users only on their request and to education and culture agencies, as well as to all governmental organizations on a compulsory basis.

What will be banned

The regulation doesn’t give direct instructions on removing sites from the black list. The document just says: “If there are no grounds for an Internet resource to stay in the restricted access list, an appropriate governmental agency, which earlier took a decision to include the resource in the list, decides to remove the internet resource’s identifiers from the restricted access list.”

So, appealing against including in the black list will most likely be possible to the agency that has put a website on the list.

In general, the responsibilities to make black lists have been laid on the State Telecommunication Inspection, which also must take into account decisions of the State Control Committee, General Prosecutor’s Office, Operational and Analytical Center and a number of other governmental bodies.

By the way, even the Belarusian State TV and Radio Company, a traditional participant of propaganda campaigns against the opposition, is also considered to be a governmental agency. So, any websites, undesirable for the state ideological machine, can be included in the black list as extremist resources or other unwanted content.

Secret ban

There is one more black list, which is available only for ISPs. ISPs should look through the list every day and update to own content filters.

What to common Bynet users, they will learn a website has been put on the black list only in practice, when they will find their access to the World Wide Web being filtered on “voluntary” or obligatory basis.