Police to Interrogate Owner of On-line Dating Agency :: Charter'97 :: News

Today in Belarus existence of on-line dating agencies disagrees with the current legislation. Namely, the Decree of the Council of Ministers No. 449 of May 2, 2005. Recently the owner of the internet-source www.amur.by was served a summons related to the work of his internet-source. A report had been drawn up against him for violation of the Article 154 Part 1 of the Administrative Code (Violation of the rules of business activities).

The administration of the www.amur.by in a special press release explains that on-line dating agencies are a common practice all over the world. Moreover, most of them are not matrimonial agencies in full measure!

Work of dating agencies includes an individual selection of a spouse, and often it includes resettlement to other countries. The agency takes money for placing a form to its database, that is why one call it his work which brings profit, and for which a licence is needed.

A usual dating site does not even have a database. As a rule, such web- sources use specialized free databases of such projects as mamba.ru or loveplanet.ru. These sources give an opportunity for anyone to add their form (under nicknames, if needed), and then they export their databases to dating agencies and any other sites for expansion of their services. One should not that such megaportals as mail.ru, rambler.ru, km.ru. pochta.ru and others are clients of mamba.ru, for instance. At the moment the number of users’ questionnaires at mamba.ru is over 3,000,000!

As a result, I is not clear why on-line dating agencies that do not have their personal databases and that do not create such databases, which do not work with clients immediately and do not obtain any profits are subject to that decree.

Any site can use databases of mamba.ru or loveplanet.ru. It shouldn’t be specialised at dating. That is why such on-line dating agencies are no more than a potential place for making acquaintance, unlike matrimonial agencies working with real clients.

And how many potential places of meeting people are there on the web?

They are chats, forums. Users fill in their profiles, adding their pictures, email addresses, phone numbers, they can write to other people, and so on… Everything happens like in real life.

Why making acquaintances in bars and discotheques are not forbidden then? Why those institutions are not required to get a licence for acquaintances? It’s absurd. And it is absurd to use the term “matrimonial agencies” for internet-sites which use databases as one of their services.

Summing up one could say that if the use of the decree would be continued in the context it is used now, there won’t be any national on-line dating agencies in Belarus left. They would be hosted at other domain zones, for instance, .com, and pay to foreign companies and not to the budget of their own country.

Who stands to gain from it? Nobody. As it often happens, the law is treated not to the benefit of one’s own country and its citizens. Now to find a penal they would have to visit Russian or, for example, Ukrainian web-sides.