Report: Google, Yandex, and other internet companies in Russia are discussing creating a database that details copyright-infringing content for easier removal
Andy / TorrentFreak :
Context & Ripple Effects
The report lands on a decade of friction between Russia's two dominant search players and its copyright lobby. Google already processes takedown volume at industrial scale — rights holders asked it to remove over a billion allegedly infringing links in a single year, and it complied with more than 90% of them (removing more than 90% of reported links). Meanwhile Yandex and Google have been adversaries before: Yandex's complaint over Android service bundling put the pair in front of Russia's competition watchdog back in 2015.
What changes here is the architecture: instead of each platform running its own notice-and-takedown pipeline, Google, Yandex, and other Russian internet companies would share one database cataloguing infringing content. Given how Moscow later escalated enforcement — threatening to slow Google's traffic and levy fines over 'prohibited content' and flooding platforms with takedown requests dominated by pro-Navalny posts — who controls that shared catalogue matters as much as the piracy use case.
First-order effects
- Platforms including Google and Yandex would cut the per-request cost of removals by checking URLs against a common infringing-content list rather than adjudicating each notice independently, while rights holders get faster, near-uniform deletion across participating services.
Second-order effects
- A shared database lowers the marginal cost of filing takedowns, inviting higher notice volumes from rights holders — and creating a ready-made template Moscow can extend from copyright to 'prohibited content' enforcement, the lever it later used against Twitter and Google with throttling threats and fines.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, content control in Russia consolidates around centrally maintained blocklists co-governed by the platforms themselves — copyright tooling hardening into general-purpose censorship infrastructure, with the same mechanism serving both rights holders and the state.
The trend: Content removal is shifting from fragmented per-platform notice-and-takedown toward shared, state-adjacent databases whose scope tends to expand beyond their original copyright mandate.