The lower chamber of the Russian parliament intends to draft amendments that would make it possible to hold Facebook and Google responsible for breaching Russian laws, chairman of the State Duma commission on foreign meddling in Russian affairs said Friday.
"Apparently, the entire agenda is being shaped abroad, in the United States, there is no legally important office here [in Russia] that we can talk to. So there is need to work out legal initiatives so that such giants would be held responsible according to Russian laws", Vasilii Piskarev told reporters.
The lawmaker suggested using fines to influence the digital giants.
"[They should be fined] one million rubles [$15,660] or several million over interfering and breaking Russian laws", Piskarev said.
Russian communications watchdog Roskomnadzor revealed last week that Google paid a fine of $10,900 for failing to delete search results linked to banned information.
In July, the watchdog slapped a nearly $11,000 fine on the tech giant for failing to remove certain content from its traffic that is deemed as violating Russian internet laws. The watchdog said that more than a third of the links from the unified registry of illicit content remained in the search results.
A year before, Russia introduced a law that requires online search engines to delete any hyperlinks to content that is banned in Russia. Google has refused to connect to the federal information system where the banned websites are listed.