PRESS: Ministry offers to use digital divide money to store data

MOSCOW, Feb 7 (PRIME) -- Russia’s Economic Development Ministry has suggested compensating expenses of connection operators on data retention from the universal service fund, to which all operators contribute 1.2% of their revenue, business daily Vedomosti reported Tuesday.

Deputy Minister Nikolai Podguzov submitted his proposal to the government in late January for a meeting on improvement of the system of universal services. Several sources told the daily the meeting will take place by February 13.

When signing the controversial data retention laws in the middle of 2016, President Vladimir Putin ordered the government to support connection operators, whose tariffs should not rise higher than the inflation rate.

The laws oblige connection operators and Internet companies to store content of calls and messages for up to six months from July 1, 2018. Metadata must be stored by connection operators for three years and one year for Internet companies from July 20, 2016.

A spokesperson for MegaFon, one of the country’s leading mobile operators, welcomed the ministry’s initiative.

The idea is opposed by state-controlled Rostelecom, which receives money from the universal service fund to bridge digital divide, a large-scale state project aimed at equipping all citizens with advanced connection services. Rostelecom builds fiber optic lines and Internet access points in remote areas.

A spokesperson for Rostelecom said taking money from the fund for the data retention laws could deprive other projects of resources and delay their implementation. The fund gathered 14.8 billion rubles in 2016, but Rostelecom got only 7.9 billion rubles, because the government does not have enough money.

Several sources said that the fund will not have enough money since data retention is expected to consume 5 trillion rubles. If the volume of required information is cut by 10 times, as the Communications and Mass Ministry proposed earlier, the laws will need 100 billion rubles, which is also much more than the fund could give, Raiffeisenbank’s analyst Sergei Libin said.

(58.7121 rubles – U.S. $1)

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