Report: Govt wants Internet control bill improved for 2 reading

MOSCOW, Feb 4 (PRIME) -- The government has ordered parliament to complete work on a bill on management of the Internet, for a second out of three mandatory readings, and welcomes the idea on the whole, business daily Vedomosti reported on Monday.

The bill’s authors said that it will not cost the government any money, but the government thinks that funds are needed for special equipment to route traffic, which operators are supposed to receive for free, creation of a monitoring and control center, and improvement of information security, the government said in its review.

New equipment should not make operators’ work more difficult, but the bill does not contain any technical requirements. It is also unclear who will be responsible for a possible break of equipment and consequent failures.

The government is not certain either about threats that would trigger the initiative and the powers of the communications service, whom the bill authorizes to set rules of local operators’ Internet traffic routing and control of these activities so that the minimum internal traffic would flow via foreign transit nodes.

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