Russia's Internet commissioner thinks the Attorney General's Office should check to see if the federal censor has overstepped its authority

Russia's Internet commissioner, Dmitry Marinichev, is calling on the Attorney General's Office to investigate the “legality and validity” of Roskomnadzor's actions against Telegram, arguing that the federal censor has caused undue harm to the country's business interests, by blocking millions of IP addresses in its campaign against the instant messenger, and disrupting hundreds of other online services.

Marinichev's suggestion is mentioned in the annual report submitted to Vladimir Putin by Russian Entrepreneurs’ Rights Commissioner Boris Titov.

A class-action lawsuit against Russia’s Federal Security Service has fared as well with the Moscow City Court as it did with Moscow’s Meshchansky District Court: both courts dismissed their claims. Filed by the Internet freedom group “Roskomsvoboda,” 35 Telegram users joined a lawsuit against the FSB in mid-March, arguing that the agency’s demands that the instant messenger surrender correspondence encryption keys violate their constitutional privacy rights.

In March 2018, the European Court of Human Rights registered Telegram’s challenge against the Meshchansky District Court’s decision in October 2017 to fine the company 800,000 rubles ($13,000) for refusing to comply with the FSB’s demands. Since mid-April, Russia’s federal censor has tried (and mostly failed) to block Telegram in Russia.