Russian Court Bans Access to YouTube Entirely

A court of the city of Komsomolsk-on-Amur in Russia's Khabarovsk region, the Far East, ruled to restrict access to world's largest video hosting YouTube and four other websites, which, as legal experts believed, contained extremist materials, Pravda.Ru news service reports.

Photo: Russian Court Bans Access to YouTube Entirely

Prosecutors of the city conducted a monitoring of the Internet and found several resources of extremist content, the experts concluded.

One of the websites contained excerpts from Adolf Hitler's renowned work Mein Kampf, which was officially recognized in Russia as an extremist book several months ago. On YouTube, the prosecutors found an extremist video titled "Russia for Russians," which is included on the federal list of extremist materials.

Russia Today: Russian court bans YouTube

The court ordered the local provider to cut access to several Russian online libraries and youtube.com website.

A spokesperson for the Internet provide in the city claimed that the company did not own the resources and therefore could not act responsible for their content. Moreover, the provider does not have any rights to restrict access to information if subscribers do not infringe upon the conditions of the use of the Internet.

Google's division in Russia claimed that the ruling of the court of Komsomolsk-on-Amur to restrict access to five Internet websites, as well as to the international video hosting YouTube had been made in violation of the Constitution of the Russian Federation, RIA Novosti reports.

"The court ruling restricts access not to separate videos, but to the whole website. Therefore, it deprives users of free access to information. It is worthy of note that YouTube contains a lot of information including the channel of the Russian president," Alla Zabrovskaya, a spokeswoman for Google Russia said.

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Author`s name Dmitry Sudakov

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