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Russia To Block LinkedIn After Court Ruling on User Data (go.com)
Social network for professionals LinkedIn faces being blocked in Russia after a court ruled it broke a law on data storage. From a report on AP:Moscow city court spokeswoman Ulyana Solopova tells The Associated Press that the court rejected an appeal Thursday by LinkedIn against a district court's decision that the company had broken a law that requires personal data on Russian citizens to be stored on servers within Russia. Solopova says LinkedIn can appeal Thursday's ruling. The case was brought by Roskomnadzor, the Russian state telecommunications and media regulator.
How is this law impossible to comply with? Put some servers in Russia. That's it. Most US internet players have already done it without any issues. LinkedIn just decided to fight it and now they lost. No biggie. Its not as though many Russians use LinkedIn. Their penetration of the Russian market is miniscule.
I'm italian. Italian government (and so do other European countries, but I know the details just for my country) are routinely blocking servers (mostly http(s) servers...So websites) for very disparate reasons in court rulings (child abuse, sexual content, defamation, infringing on copyright and registered trademarks etc.).
Those server are almost never in the country (When they happen to be in the country they just send the police to the physical location). The block is usually a simple DNS block, they force all national ISPs to make the DNS records of the blocked sites point to a specific, state operated IP address. In a few cases I know they also forced providers to pollute routing tables, but that has other technical issues so that technique is usually avoided.
All technicians know that method is not bulletproof and also judges and politicians know, but it's not a problem for them, because 99% of the users don't know how to work around such a block (and don't care enough to spend 3 minutes on it), and blocking 99% of users is more than what they need.
This applies in this case too. causing 90% or even just 75% of Russian linked in traffic to disappear could be bad enough for linkedin as a punishment.