Moscow. September 14th. INTERFAX.RU – Bailiffs are trying to get Google to comply with the decision of the Russian court and exclude Smart Voting from search results, Interfax was told by the press bureau of the Federal Bailiff Service (FSSP).
A day earlier, the media reported that the bailiffs came to the Moscow office of Google.
At the request of the agency about the reasons for the visit, the press bureau replied that the FSSP is under enforcement proceedings, initiated on the basis of a court order issued by the court against Google, LLC. Within the framework of this enforcement proceedings, “enforcement measures are being taken as provided for by the current legislation of the Russian Federation.”
On September 3, the Moscow Arbitration Court banned Yandex and Google from using the designation “Smart Vote” in search results “as one of the search keywords” as an interim measure in the claim of the Russian LLC “Wulintertrade”, which patented the trademark “smart voting”. Yandex excluded the link to the site of this project from the search results, but promised to appeal the court decision.
From the data bank of the FSSP it follows that the case was initiated on September 7.
The “Smart Voting” project was invented by politician Alexei Navalny and his associates; it consists in choosing certain candidates for whom it is recommended to vote. Navalny's associates noted that they were not summoned to court in connection with the proceedings with Wulintertrade.
On September 6, Roskomnadzor reported that the Smart Voting website was blocked in Russia because it is being used to continue the activities of the FBK (the Anti-Corruption Foundation, recognized in Russia as a foreign agent, an extremist organization, and banned).
On September 9, RKN demanded that Apple, Google, Cloudflare and Cisco stop providing opportunities to bypass the blocking of the Smart Voting website in Russia, as well as the mobile application of Navalny's associates in connection with violation of electoral laws. The companies were reminded that it is unacceptable “to provide services that violate Russian electoral legislation, including those related to election campaigning on the Internet and posting campaign materials on the Internet.” Failure to comply with these requirements in Russia will be regarded as foreign interference in the Russian elections.
Google has more than once been brought to administrative responsibility for violating Russian law. However, the FSSP does not contain information on the initiation of enforcement proceedings to collect these fines.
According to Roskomnadzor, since the beginning of the year, the amount of fines imposed by the courts against Google amounted to 32.5 million rubles. The company, according to the department, has paid only 3.5 million rubles so far.
