«The decision of the Executive Analytical Center was a setback, but not a tragedy.» Media managers and experts comment on the new order allowing to seize domain names

The Belaru­sian gov­ern­ment is mak­ing it eas­i­er to sup­press inde­pen­dent media out­lets by shut­ting down all web­sites list­ed as extrem­ist mate­ri­als and reg­is­tered with the nation­al domain exten­sion .by. What con­se­quences will this rul­ing have for inde­pen­dent media? What can be done to oppose the arbi­trary use of law by the Belaru­sian author­i­ties? BAJ tried to fig­ure it out with the experts.

Pho­to: Field Engi­neer for pexels.com

Reform.by: «We are expe­ri­enc­ing tech­ni­cal dif­fi­cul­ties»

The Reform.by web­site has already announced that it is switch­ing to the domain name Reform.News, which was pre­vi­ous­ly used as a mir­ror site. How­ev­er, this domain name is also blocked on the ter­ri­to­ry of Belarus.

Accord­ing to Fio­dar Pauluchen­ka, edi­tor-in-chief at Reform.by, the site will move to Reform.News URL as soon as the cur­rent domain is seized by the author­i­ties.

«We are expe­ri­enc­ing tech­ni­cal dif­fi­cul­ties. Google and oth­er search engines eval­u­ate sites based on their his­to­ry, back­links, and author­i­ty.

The Exec­u­tive Ana­lyt­i­cal Cen­ter’s (EAC) deci­sion was a set­back for us. We will have to start almost every­thing from scratch. How­ev­er, it is not a tragedy. The site is already blocked in Belarus, and the domain has been pes­simized.”

Fio­dar Pauluchen­ka. Cour­tesy pho­to

“We will con­tin­ue our work and active­ly pro­mote our new domain on social media to encour­age our tar­get audi­ence to book­mark it. The Belaru­sian author­i­ties’ inten­tions for the seized domains are unclear. I believe that pro­pa­gan­da mate­ri­als or provo­ca­tions may be post­ed there in the future.”

Fio­dar Pauluchen­ka thinks that chang­ing the domain name will not have a sig­nif­i­cant impact on the core audi­ence. How­ev­er, it may cause some incon­ve­nience for those who only con­sume con­tent occa­sion­al­ly.

«Users who arrive at our site through search engines or social net­works may encounter issues. We acknowl­edge that the EAC’s order will reduce our poten­tial audi­ence. How­ev­er, we remain opti­mistic as we have per­se­vered through chal­leng­ing con­di­tions until now.”

The domain name Reform.news has already been blocked in Belarus. Fio­dar Pauluchen­ka sees no point in cre­at­ing new mir­ror sites.

«Jump­ing from one mir­ror site to anoth­er is not the solu­tion to the prob­lem. There are sim­ple and effec­tive ways to bypass block­ing. You can use a VPN, tem­po­rary URLs, or AMP URLs (Google offers the tech­nol­o­gy that is much more dif­fi­cult to block). Belaru­sian con­sumers need to improve their tech­no­log­i­cal lev­el. This is the only solu­tion to the prob­lem.”

Fio­dar Pauluchen­ka argues that the order of the EAC con­tra­dicts the glob­al rules of the Inter­net. These rules are estab­lished by inter­na­tion­al cor­po­ra­tions. It is there­fore rec­om­mend­ed to con­tact ICANN and pro­pose revok­ing EAC’s sta­tus as the nation­al admin­is­tra­tor of the .by domain exten­sion. «The work takes time, so it needs to start imme­di­ate­ly,» says the edi­tor-in-chief.

The author­i­ties seized BAJ’s domain name and email address

Euro­ra­dio: «None of our domains depends on the Belaru­sian reg­is­trar»

Accord­ing to Pavel Sviard­lou, edi­tor-in-chief of Euro­ra­dio, the EAC order does not cause any addi­tion­al issues for the resource:

«The new order does not pose any prob­lems for Euro­ra­dio. We had ini­tial­ly con­sid­ered how to ensure the resilience of our media. We no longer use Cyril­lic domains with the .бел exten­sion, which we had reg­is­tered as a pre­cau­tion. Cur­rent­ly, no Euro­ra­dio domains are reg­is­tered with the Belaru­sian reg­is­trar.”

Pavel Sviard­lou. Pho­to: kyky.org

“We pub­lish on the main and back­up domains: euroradio.fm and euroradio.by. These domains are reg­is­tered out­side Belarus. We have long under­stood the repres­sive nature of how Lukashenka’s offi­cials are try­ing to ‘reg­u­late’ the Inter­net.”

Mr. Sviard­lou is sure that noth­ing can hap­pen to these domain names:

«To take away our domains, the EAC needs to con­tact ICANN, a non-prof­it orga­ni­za­tion that man­ages domain names and IP address­es. But we hope that they are aware that the Belaru­sian author­i­ties use the word ‘extrem­ism’ incor­rect­ly. Label­ing inde­pen­dent media as ‘extrem­ist mate­ri­als’ is a con­ve­nient way for them to cen­sor the media mar­ket and sup­press polit­i­cal oppo­nents.”

«Total con­trol over the inter­net in Belarus is impos­si­ble as long as it remains turned on»

Pauluk Byk­ous­ki, a senior ana­lyst at Medi­aIQ, says that the author­i­ties have not come up with new ways to «influ­ence and con­trol the media space.» How­ev­er, the expert also sees sev­er­al «key changes» in the EAC order.

«Domains can now be clas­si­fied as ‘extrem­ist mate­ri­als’ not only based on their con­tent but also for ‘nation­al secu­ri­ty pro­tec­tion pur­pos­es.’ The courts have inter­pret­ed ‘extrem­ist con­tent’ broad­ly, even with­out a spe­cif­ic order. This prac­tice of broad inter­pre­ta­tion can now occur on a large scale.”

Pauluk Byk­ous­ki

Domain name reg­is­tra­tion and man­age­ment have always been tak­en seri­ous­ly. How­ev­er, the EAC’s order now includes addi­tion­al «shades or facets that did not exist before.»

«I have friends who have pur­chased domain names. They were not inter­est­ed in pol­i­tics. How­ev­er, they some­times acquired domain names belong­ing to indi­vid­u­als labeled as ‘extrem­ists’ or ‘ter­ror­ists’. At an auc­tion, they pur­chased a beau­ti­ful domain name. The pre­vi­ous own­ers could not be locat­ed in the pub­lic domain, as the resources were no longer avail­able. I don’t know what will hap­pen to the domain names that were sold and bought now. It seems that these domain names will sim­ply be unavail­able, can­celed,» says Mr. Byk­ous­ki.

The EAC order will pri­mar­i­ly encour­age inde­pen­dent media and blog­gers to move to West­ern domains and plat­forms. On one hand, mon­e­tiz­ing con­tent will become more dif­fi­cult, but the threat of «expro­pri­a­tion» dis­ap­pears.

«The Belaru­sian author­i­ties have tied all con­tent pub­lish­ers to the Belaru­sian infor­ma­tion space through Decree No. 60 and oth­er reg­u­la­to­ry acts. You want to earn mon­ey from adver­tis­ing in Belarus? You must estab­lish a Belaru­sian com­pa­ny, you must have a domain exten­sion .by, and you must have a Belaru­sian host­ing ser­vice. Those who earned mon­ey from adver­tis­ing in Belarus will now lose access to this sec­tor. They will either turn to grant financ­ing or look for con­tex­tu­al or less prof­itable adver­tis­ing. But no one wants to go idle and die.”

What hap­pens in the end?

«If the author­i­ties wish to increase their super­vi­sion of con­tent for Belaru­sian inter­net users, they will now lose their pre­vi­ous lev­el of con­trol. Mov­ing the pub­lish­ers of these resources to oth­er domain zones will free them from the need to self-cen­sor. The Main Direc­torate of Com­bat­ing Orga­nized Crime and Cor­rup­tion will not be able to scare them. Although they will no longer have Belaru­sian adver­tis­ing, they can still pro­duce con­tent. This is a dou­ble-edged sword: clean­ing up the Belaru­sian media space is a log­i­cal move for the author­i­ties. How­ev­er, many inde­pen­dent pub­li­ca­tions in exile had to cre­ate domain names with oth­er exten­sions, such as .media, .info, .com, and so on.”

The EAC order will not cause sig­nif­i­cant dis­rup­tions. How­ev­er, there are still some nuances to con­sid­er. Pre­vi­ous amend­ments to the Crim­i­nal Code have result­ed in the auto­mat­ic trans­fer of the label “extrem­ist con­tent” to any mir­ror site.

«No addi­tion­al court deci­sion is required for this. The race to block ‘wrong’ domains will now begin to deter­mine the win­ner. Con­tent cre­ators will estab­lish mir­ror sites that can be cranked out end­less­ly. They will also cre­ate mir­rors that are dif­fi­cult to block in Belarus, using exist­ing tech­nolo­gies. Let’s see who will be the win­ner in this com­pe­ti­tion,» the expert says. «For the audi­ence, this order will bring addi­tion­al restric­tions on access to alter­na­tive infor­ma­tion. But any­one who wants to find such infor­ma­tion will find it. The author­i­ties can­not estab­lish full con­trol as long as the inter­net is not shut down in Belarus.”

«The author­i­ties are stream­lin­ing repres­sion by remov­ing legal obsta­cles»

Aleh Aheyeu, Deputy Chair­man of the Belaru­sian Asso­ci­a­tion of Jour­nal­ists, believes that most inde­pen­dent media out­lets have already moved away from using the .by domain exten­sion.

«There­fore, this inno­va­tion pos­es a threat to media still using the .by domain exten­sion and may be labeled as extrem­ist con­tent soon. They may soon lose the abil­i­ty to admin­is­ter web­sites. The Exec­u­tive Ana­lyt­i­cal Cen­ter will like­ly take them over.”

Aleh Aheyeu Pho­to: BAJ

What will hap­pen to the seized domain names? There is dis­cus­sion in the media com­mu­ni­ty that instead of well-known socio-polit­i­cal resources, Russ­ian-world and provoca­tive web­sites may appear at their pre­vi­ous domain names. The lawyer agrees that such a threat does exist.

«Assess­ing its poten­tial is chal­leng­ing since cre­at­ing media, fill­ing it with con­tent, and acquir­ing the nec­es­sary orga­ni­za­tion­al resources and fund­ing all require good man­age­ment. If you have the resources and the desire to use a well-known domain name for Russ­ian pro­pa­gan­da, this will cer­tain­ly hap­pen,» says Mr. Aheyeu. «The EAC obvi­ous­ly wants to trade these domain names and auc­tion them off.»

Is it pos­si­ble to deprive the EAC of the right of a nation­al admin­is­tra­tor to man­age the .by domain exten­sion data­base?

«Many peo­ple would like that to hap­pen, but there is no pos­si­bil­i­ty. ICANN sim­ply does not have such func­tion­al­i­ty. ICANN can­not strip any­one of the sta­tus of a nation­al domain exten­sion reg­u­la­tor, as it does not have such author­i­ty.”

So the only thing left for inde­pen­dent media in the cur­rent sit­u­a­tion is to per­ma­nent­ly emi­grate from the .by domain exten­sion?

«It’s like invest­ment. The Belaru­sian author­i­ties con­tin­ue to demon­strate their inad­e­qua­cy and law­less­ness. All activ­i­ties in which the Belaru­sian state can inter­fere are risky. You need to under­stand that every­thing relat­ed to the domain exten­sion .by is ful­ly con­trolled, reg­u­lat­ed, and arbi­trary. To expose one­self to such risks or do any­thing else under the con­trol of the author­i­ties in such inad­e­quate con­di­tions is extreme­ly unwise.”

For a con­sid­er­able amount of time, the Belaru­sian author­i­ties have act­ed with impuni­ty, dis­re­gard­ing any legal frame­work. The author­i­ties took a con­sid­er­able amount of time to grad­u­al­ly take con­trol of the web­sites.

“Using the exam­ple of the BAJ web­site, I can say that the entire process, from set­ting unre­al­is­tic require­ments to tak­ing con­trol of the site, took three months. We appealed, we argued, and we jus­ti­fied our posi­tion — but the oppo­nent chose to spend a lot of resources to take con­trol of one web­site. Then they decid­ed to take over dozens of sites in one go. To achieve this, author­i­ties are remov­ing legal obsta­cles that pre­vent sites from being tak­en over en masse, rather than indi­vid­u­al­ly.”

This is anoth­er instance of increas­ing repres­sion. Regret­tably, it is not the first one, and it is like­ly not the last. When exam­in­ing admin­is­tra­tive and crim­i­nal law, the pri­ma­ry focus of legal changes is to stream­line repres­sion for the gov­ern­ment.