Twitch Will Not Be Banned In Russia Following Russian Lawsuit. And the Case Dropped

Twitch has avoided getting banned in Russia after the lawsuit from Russian media company, Rambler Group was dropped. The lawsuit was asking seeking Twitch to be banned in Russia and Twitch to pay damages of $2.8 billion for violating exclusive distribution rights after streamers were caught broadcasting the English Premier League. Vladim Ampelonsky, the spokesperson for Roskomandzor, told state media that the government is no longer pursuing Twitch and the case has been dropped.

Well no shit. I’m no law guy, but something tells me that you can’t go after Twitch for something a streamer did. And maybe Russia realized this. Maybe they realized it was an anger reaction that wouldn’t play in their favor and would just be a fat sum of money they’d lose. Hell, there have been people on Twitch doing meth, getting naked, and whatever else you could think of. How are you supposed to police 3 million streamers? It’s impossible. They did there job of banning them when they found out they were streaming these games.

Twitch’s Russian viewer base makes up 6.3% of the market share in Twitch viewership. This makes it the third largest after the United States, and Germany. So you can say that losing this market would hurt, especially around CS:GO and Dota 2 events.. But lets get real. Twitch would be fine even if that did happened.