Rostelecom says anonymizer ban not to hurt VPN business

MOSCOW, Aug 4 (PRIME) -- A recent law forbidding the use of technologies to access blocked resources, so-called anonymizers and virtual private networks (VPN), will not hurt the VPN business of Russian telecom giant Rostelecom, Senior Vice President for Business Development and Management Vladimir Kiriyenko said in a conference call late on Thursday.

President Vladimir Putin signed the law on July 30. It seeks to ban information systems and programs to can see Internet resources that are restricted on the territory of the country. The document offers to grant owners of such systems and programs access to the information resource of the communications service with data on restricted Web sites.

“We don’t think that this poses any threat to our business,” Kiriyenko said.

“As we see it, the law encompasses restriction on using VPNs to access services that are officially banned in Russia…Our clients don’t use VPN for that, we provide VPN for corporate clients. So, we think that it will not hurt our business, but it will largely promote the idea of people switching to understandable and transparent VPN contracts. So we think it will either have no impact or be a positive factor,” he said.

In April–June, Rostelecom’s revenue from VPN services increased 10% on the year to 5.707 billion rubles and accounted to 7.6% of the total revenue for the period.

(60.7503 rubles – U.S. $1)

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