Russia is formally cracking down on anonymizing web services–tools that permit users to get sites and content which may be prohibited in the state. Roscomnadzor, the Internet censor in Russia, has added its blacklist registry and the anonymizing service NoBlock.

The block came after a court in Anapa may be utilized to get content that had previously been added to the extremist contents list. The court decree from 13 April, 2015, says NoBlock would enable Internet users “to have complete accessibility to all restricted sites through anonymous browsing and user IP masking.”

The exact same court in Anapa prohibited two other anonymizers, together with the various decrees basically carbon copies of the one previously, and was fairly active in April, but those sites never have been added to the Roscomnadzor-handled sites that are blocked registry. Several other Russian courts, including some in Dagestan and Bashkortostan, have also ruled to block anonymizers, but the court decrees don’t show the particular addresses of the restricted sites.

Actually, the section of the site possessed by RosKomSvoboda just supplied directions about how to avoid accessibility and geoblocking sites blacklisted in Russia.

It is worth noting that in nearly all the opinions, the court mentioned present laws not unique to Internet anonymization services, including the law on extremism. However, the reality the court stipulated the term “anonymizer” as one of the assumptions for blocking the sites is cause for worry, since anonymizers, proxy servers, and other similar tools aren’t expressly prohibited in Russia.

Russian officials have debated with limitations on VPNs and anonymizers for quite some time. In February 2015, Leonid Levin, an MP heading the parliamentary committee on communications and information policy, proposed that accessibility to circumvention and anonymization software like VPNs, and proxy servers needed to be limited.