AKIPRESS.COM - A Moscow court upheld a decision to ban the professional social network LinkedIn Corp. in Russia on Thursday in a landmark ruling enforcing a personal data law, reports The Wall Street Journal.

LinkedIn is the first foreign company to publicly clash with Russia’s communications regulator, Roskomnadzor, over the law, which requires foreign and local companies to store personal data of Russian users within the country’s borders from September 2015.

A spokesman for Roskomnadzor said the agency would proceed with blocking the website as soon as it received the court’s decision.

The spokesman also said that the regulator would now enter LinkedIn into a special registry of websites that are in violation of the data-localization law. The website will be blocked in Russia three working days after that, he added.

In early August, a lower court ruled in favor of Roskomnadzor, saying that LinkedIn didn’t comply with Russian law on two counts: by not storing information about Russians on servers inside the country, and by processing information about third parties who aren’t registered on the site and haven’t signed the company’s user agreement.

In response to the court decision, a spokesman for LinkedIn said the court decision “has the potential to deny access to LinkedIn for the millions of members we have in Russia and the companies that use LinkedIn to grow their businesses.”

The company said it was interested in meeting with Roskomnadzor to discuss the data-localization law.

LinkedIn has 2.6 million users who access the site from computers and phones in Russia, according to the marketing research firm TNS.