Russia's telecoms score minor lobbying victory against impending counter-terrorist regulations

The Russian federal government has reportedly agreed to water down some of the data-storage requirements imposed by counter-terrorist legislation set to take effect later this year. According to the newspaper Kommersant, Deputy Communication Minister Dmitry Alkhazov has written a letter to the Russian Union of Industrialists and Entrepreneurs, laying out several concessions to the telecoms industry.

First, implementation of the so-called “Yarovaya Law” will apparently be postponed from July 2018 to October 2018. Second, actual user traffic (not mere monitoring capacity) will now determine the amount of data Internet operators are required to store.

Russian telecoms still failed, however, to convince the state to shoulder any of the financial burden of building and maintaining the massive data-storage infrastructure needed to comply with the country’s new laws. Three of the biggest companies estimated that compliance costs in 2018 alone would be nearly $1.8 billion, saying they can only afford to spend about $53 billion annually on these measures.

The “Yarovaya” counter-terrorist laws were adopted in the summer of 2016, requiring Internet and communications providers to store all user data and correspondence for six months and make the information accessible to Russian federal agents.