Page 140 - RusRPTOct22

have to submit data about the advertisements placed and related contracts.
The bill appeared a little over a year ago - in May 2021, it was submitted to the State Duma by LDPR deputy Sergei Zhigarev, and in July the amendments were signed by Vladimir Putin.
The appearance of the amendments coincided with the height of the struggle between Roskomnadzor and foreign Internet giants. The state tried its best to force American bigtechs to open representative offices in Russia, join special registers of Roskomnadzor and store data of Russians on the territory of the country. By January 1, 2022, the so-called law on the "landing" of foreign IT companies was supposed to come into force.
It also came with a law on accounting for advertising - it was another mechanism for forcing foreign companies to leave all the data in Russia, says Boris Omelnitsky, president of the Association for the Development of Interactive Advertising. Traces of this remained in the latest version of the amendments. In addition to creating a registry for online advertising, there are two more points.
One of them provides that Roskomnadzor may draw up a list of foreign platforms on which it will be prohibited to place ads aimed at Russian users.
The second is a ban on the placement of advertisements in Russia by a foreign advertiser, if he also falls into this list.
The Ad Accounting Amendments are a tool to control these restrictions against foreign platforms. “It was a logical mechanism for forcing any market participants not to advertise on prohibited sites,” explains the head of the ARIR.
Roskomnadzor at the time of the development of the amendments was preparing for a war with foreign tech giants like Google and Meta (recognized as extremist), which were not going to “land” in all form in Russia. A year later, this problem was solved radically: Instagram was blocked in Russia, Google and Meta decided to no longer accept money from Russians. But the law approved by Putin last summer remained. “You can’t turn the stuffing back. Plus, when there is a financial interest in the appearance of advertising data operators and the ability to collect more data from the market, no one will roll back,” says RAEC Chief Analyst Karen Kazaryan.
The online advertising market itself has grown rapidly in recent years and has long overtaken television. In 2021, the TV advertising market amounted to 197bn rubles against 313bn rubles from the Internet. The entire advertising market in Russia last year exceeded the psychological mark of 500bn rubles and amounted to 578bn rubles. “The authorities could not help but wonder:
140 RUSSIA Country Report October 2022 www.intellinews.com