PRESS: Govt experts blast Runet safety bill as costly, tricky

MOSCOW, Dec 25 (PRIME) -- Creation of a sovereign Internet may disrupt web’s operations in Russia, boost the watchdog’s authority excessively and will require up to 134 billion rubles in compensations to operators every year, business daily Kommersant reported on Tuesday quoting an expert council under the Russian government.

The experts calculated possible one-time expenses at 25 billion rubles on research and design works and creation of a register of traffic exchange points. Compensations to operators for troubles in their networks, the risk of which is seen as high, will be needed, and their amount should be up to 10% of the market volume or 134 billion rubles per year.

The authors of the bill, submitted to parliament’s lower house, on December 14, explained their initiative by a potential threat from the U.S., which earlier adopted a national cybersecurity strategy.

The expert council doubted the reasons behind the bill. “It’s unclear what the threats are. Neither the bill nor the explanatory note describes these threats or flaws of the existing law,” it said.

The bill also contains technically unfeasible requirements, like it offers operators to share with the communications watchdog their complete scheme of networks and traffic routing.

A market source told the daily, “The suggested measures are excessive, hardly possible from the technical point of view, and carry serious risks of problems with the Internet traffic flow on the territory of Russia. The goals declared in the document can be reached with the existing capacities of operators.”

(68.4073 rubles – U.S. $1)

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