PRESS: Authorities take softer look on data law, may delay till Oct

MOSCOW, Jan 22 (PRIME) -- Russian telecom and Internet companies seem to have persuaded authorities to mitigate the data retention law and calculate the required volume of storage facilities on the basis of actual traffic, rather than network capacities, and coming into force of the law may move to October from July, business daily Kommersant reported on Monday.

The Communications and Mass Media Ministry abandoned the idea to calculate the volume of storage facilities to fulfill the law, which obliges telecom companies and Internet operators to keep content of users’ traffic for up to six months, by capacities of networks, which should cut operators’ expenses, according to a letter from Deputy Minister Dmitry Alkhazov to the Russian Union of Industrialists and Entrepreneurs (RSPP).

The letter was prepared in response to a conclusion of the union’s IT commission to Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev.

The ministry agreed with the union that total capacities of networks exceed the volume of actual subscriber traffic. The deliberated draft of the ministry’s ruling reads that operators will have to store transferred traffic, excluding voice, for 30 days. The volume of information to be retained can be revised after December 1, 2022.

In the previous version of the ruling, operators were supposed to need 0.35 petabyte of storage per 1 gigabit per second of network capacity with a further annual increase by 15% during five years starting from July 1. In this case, total expenses of local major mobile operators MTS, MegaFon, and VimpelCom were seen at 100 billion rubles in 2018.

Without budget co-financing, these operators could allocate on the data law no more than 3 billion rubles per year each, as the RSPP said, but the ministry said the budget does not stipulate any compensation for the law.

A connection market source told the daily, that entry into force of the law could be postponed till October.

(56.5892 rubles – U.S. $1)

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