Last week, the Industry and Trade Ministry suggested to entrust the National Informatics Center (NIC), a subsidiary of the state-owned corporation Rostec, with implementing the requirements of the new “anti-terrorist” legislation related to the storage of phone and Internet communications.
Dubbed “Big Brother law,” this legislation was adopted by the Russian parliament and signed by President Putin some two months ago, leaving many questions open regarding its implementation. Not only is the law severe against those involved in “international terrorism,” its financing or non-denunciation. Russia’s telecom and Internet industries are directly affected by several key provisions. In particular, mobile operators and Internet companies will need to store the recordings of all phone calls and the content of all text messages for a period of six months. Metadata on these communications will need to be kept for three years by telecom companies and for one year by Internet companies.
Among the obstacles to implementing such rules is the fact that the required data storage infrastructure does not exist currently, the authorities conceded.
But the Industry and Trade Ministry ministry is confident that the NIC is up to the task. Moreover, this option will save money by centralizing a range of technical requirements, the ministry believes, and will allow mobile operators to simply pay a regular fee for the service rather than spending considerable amounts to develop the data storage infrastructure themselves.
The Russian business daily Vedomosti learned from two sources close to Rostec that, in a letter to Industry and Trade Minister Denis Manturov, the corporation’s acting CEO Vladimir Artyakov suggested that the required data storage infrastructure be built by a unique operator, which would receive an initial, risk-free investment from the Pension Fund of Russia (PFR).
The cost of said infrastructure could amount to some 100 billion rubles (approximately $1.5 billion at the current exchange rate). The FPR’s investment would be made profitable over five years as mobile operators would settled their annual fee of $3-4 billion rubles (from $46 to $61 million) for each of them, according to the reported Artyakov letter.
In their previous own estimates, mobile operators put the implementation costs for mobile operators at more than $30 billion dollars — far above the $1.5 billion mentioned in the reported Astryakov letter. Another estimate even put the figure at more than $150 billion.
Rostec and Rostelecom declined to provide any official estimate until the government formulates the associated by-laws.
Meanwhile Bulat, a joint venture of Rostelecom and Rostec, is holding discussions with Huawei and Lenovo about technology transfers in the fields of server production, data storage systems and other equipment related to the new legislation, reported Kommersant.
Huawei might even acquire a minority stake in Bulat. Such a move would allow the Chinese company to secure its Russian business in spite of Russia’s new import-substitution strategy.
Source: Vedomosti, Kommersant.
