Will anyt bucreacrat be able to close a website?

Such are the provisions of the draft decree of Alyaksandr Lukashenka on Internet space, the European Radio for Belarus notes.

In the text of the new Law on Mass Media, which was put into force since February 8, 2009, includes warning that in some time the state would proceed to control on the web. And now it seems the time of the state control over the Internet has come: on December 14 the text of the draft decree “On measures for revising use of the national segment of the World Wide Web” was revealed.

According to the head of the national program “Electronic Belarus” Mikhail Darashevich, most ides from the decree repeat already existing rules for the Internet. But there are things which hadn’t existed.

“I see as a rather negative thing, which is an international problem by the way, shifting responsibility for users’ actions on providers. It is a “novelty”, as providers didn’t bear such a responsibility previously. Identification of users was previously made by providers, they gave this information for some investigative measures, and it is a normal practice. But their bearing responsibility for users seem not appropriate to me, and contradicts international trends,” Mikhail Darashevich said.

The second negative novelty names by the expert is a possibility to limit access of users to some web resource “at request of citizens”.

“Some users can say that do not like this or that resource, and a provider must block users from reading it,” the expert notes. “I see very many stumbling-blocks here. If state officials find objectionable some website, they would say: “We believe access to this website should be limited,” a provider would have to follow this request.

Under the decree, in three months after its publication the Council of Ministers is to provide regulations for work of the Belarusian segment of the web. In fact it means that websites must be registered as mass media. But it is not clear from the document how this procedure would look like, Darashevich said. Neither it explains what the websites denied registration should do.