State officials speak for increased control over internet

Aleh Praliaskouski, director of the Informational Analytical Center at the Presidential Administration, insists on ‘strengthening of responsibility for wrongful information on the Internet’. The official said it in an interview to the Belaruskaya Dumka magazine.

According to him, the state regulation of the Internet should contain a complex of legislative and organizational measures. ‘The responsibility for spreading of wrongful information on the Internet should be strengthened on legislative level. If information appears on a site, an administrator, an owner of the resource and a provider must be responsible for it’, Praliaskouski emphasized.

‘What concerns organizational measures, we need to think about the so called content filtration. It is a technique that allows users and local networks administrators to block access to the sites, containing the information that conflicts with the current legal system or contradicts the norms of public morality,’ the head of the Informational Analytical Center thinks.

Aleh Praliaskouski said Belarus is learning the experience of Internet regulation from other countries. The specially created interagency republican working group deals with it. ‘The main thing for us is that the regulation measures it works out, from the one hand promote developing of the global information society, based on principles of freedom of expression and free access to information, and from the other hand don’t allow unpunished using of the Internet for unlawful purposes,’ he noted.

Earlier the first deputy minister of information Liliya Ananich spoke for obligatory state registration of Internet media. In her view, Belarus has faced a problem of ‘stream of misinformation from foreign sites’. ‘But there are practices used in China, which blocked the access to the sites on its territory’, Ananich thinks.