The government may oblige the remaining cloud and streaming services in Russia to pay for traffic in favor of domestic telecom operators. Kommersant writes about this, referring to the list of industry proposals prepared by the Ministry of Finance.
The idea of introducing a traffic pass service from international bigtech companies is being considered. Such a measure will require the adoption of a special law. As the relevant State Duma committee informed Kommersant, “work is underway” in this direction.
The Ministry of Finance has already come up with such an initiative last year: then it was part of the “roadmap” to create additional conditions for the development of the telecommunications industry. . In particular, they wanted to include Facebook (part of the Meta company, recognized as an extremist organization and banned in the Russian Federation), Amazon, Apple, Mocrosoft in the list of such companies.
Some experts noted that foreign services receive money from Russian users and do not invest in Russia’s infrastructure, so charging a reasonable fee is not a bad idea.
Some experts felt that such an initiative could not be implemented now. This is due to the fact that it is necessary to amend the law “On Communications”, because now the traffic pass service is already legally defined and for its provision it is necessary to obtain an appropriate license. In addition, against the background of the departure of the vast majority of companies, this initiative is redundant.