LinkedIn, the social networking service, is being blocked in Russia because the company failed to handover the data of users from the country.
Russian law apparently requires all online sites to store personal data on national servers, according to TechCrunch.
Roskomnadzor, the country’s premiere communications regulatory agency, issued the order to deny its populace access to LinkedIn’s virtual services. A Moscow District Court decided in August to block the website, and another court chose to upheld the verdict roughly a week ago, according to Reuters.
“LinkedIn’s vision is to create economic opportunity for the entire global workforce. We are starting to hear from members in Russia that they can no longer access LinkedIn,” a company spokesperson told TechCrunch.
“Roskomnadzor’s action to block LinkedIn denies access to the millions of members we have in Russia and the companies that use LinkedIn to grow their businesses. We remain interested in a meeting with Roskomnadzor to discuss their data localization request.”
LinkedIn may be willing to alter its website and technical infrastructure to be permitted access to the Russian market. The business networking company essentially created a whole different website in 2014 so that it could comply with Chinese censorship rules.
“They have realized in order to be successful in China you cannot take a business model from the West and cut and paste it and expect it to work,” Edward Tse, chief executive of global strategy consulting firm Gao Feng Advisory Co., told The Wall Street Journal.
LinkedIn may do the same with Russia so it can maintain the millions of registered users in the country, even if it disappoints human-rights advocates who are against the wide array of censorship laws Russia employs.
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