Will mobile operators double their prices?

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

Last week, Russia not only blocked the Telegram messenger, but also approved the "Yarovaya law", setting the date for its entry into force. After reviewing the final document, it was signed by Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev, thereby forcing all cellular operators and Internet providers to start creating a special system for storing data, as well as, no less important, reconfiguring all equipment.

All this will affect prices for ordinary Russians, because MTS, Beeline and MegaFon are planning to raise them, and twice.

If you do not go into details, then starting from July 1, 2018, Russian telecom operators, if they do not want to lose their license, are obliged to keep the telephone conversations of all their subscribers for 6 months so that employees of the Ministry of Internal Affairs and the FSB can quickly access them. This means that every conversation a person makes on the territory of the Russian Federation will be recorded and entered into a huge database consisting of hundreds of petabytes (more than a terabyte) of data.

The saddest thing for mobile operators will begin on October 1, 2018, because from now on, operators, like all Internet providers, will have to store all Internet traffic of their customers, including encrypted ones. This will need to be done within 30 days. Legislation, or rather the "Yarovaya Law", obliges to store videos, sounds, images, voice messages and other data, up to copies of visited sites. All this is necessary for the prompt and effective fight against terrorism.

Over the next five years, after October 1, 2018, operators will have to increase their storage capacity by 15% annually. Ultimately, this will increase the storage time of data to almost two months, so that law enforcement agencies can do their job more efficiently. To implement the “Yarovaya law in practice, Russian operators will have to spend over 35 billion rubles, and private companies, including some of the largest in the country, simply don’t have that kind of money.

It is assumed that MTS, Beeline, MegaFon and other operators will raise prices, moreover, in Russia and for all subscribers. We are talking about doubling or more payments for mobile Internet and communications, independent experts assure. If tariffs remain at the same level, operators will find themselves on the brink of bankruptcy, or they will have to abandon the development of their infrastructure for more than five years, and this will “freeze” the entire business.

It should be noted that similar initiatives are observed in the "stronghold of democracy" - the United States:

Microsoft, Apple and Google ordered to issue correspondence to authorities

Microsoft, Apple and Google are obliged to give out to the US authorities the correspondence of users from servers around the world.

In the United States, it was recognized as unjustified by Microsoft's lawsuit against the government, in which the company defended its unwillingness to transfer data stored on its foreign servers to the FBI. The reason is changes in US legislation, according to which law enforcement officers can now freely access foreign data from Microsoft, Google, Apple and other companies.

End of Microsoft litigation

Microsoft is now obligated to provide the US authorities with user data stored on its servers around the world. This is the result of the company's litigation with the US government, which ended in the Supreme Court. The reason for the litigation was that the government wanted to gain access to the user's correspondence stored on the company's servers in Ireland.

A few days ago, US legislation governing such issues was changed through the so-called CLOUD Act, and Microsoft's reluctance to provide data was viewed as an unfounded claim. Prior to that, it was believed that the outcome of the Microsoft case, whatever it may be, should become the precedent according to which such cases will be resolved in the future.

The US Department of Justice has already taken steps to invalidate Microsoft's claim as unfounded. Formally, this decision is yet to be confirmed by the Supreme Court, but there is no doubt that it will.

Cloud law

In March 2018, the House of Representatives - the lower house of Congress, the US Parliament - approved the so-called CLOUD Act. The full name of the law sounds like the Clarifying Lawful Overseas Use of Data Act, that is, "an act clarifying the legal use of data abroad." The CLOUD Act legally allows US law enforcement agencies, subject to a court order, to receive from US IT companies the data of US citizens stored with them, wherever this data is located geographically, including abroad.

Legally, the CLOUD Act is a set of amendments to the Stored Communications Act (SCA), passed in 1986. Prior to the CLOUD Act, the law allowed law enforcement agencies to require companies to provide only data that was physically located in the United States.

The authorities motivate changes in legislation by the fact that cloud technologies are becoming more widespread, and users are beginning to increasingly practice storing data on remote servers. The immediate reason for the development of new legislation was precisely the lawsuit between Microsoft and the government.

Contradictions in the law

The specialized media note that the CLOUD Act itself is rather controversial - it allows companies to demand data stored abroad from companies, but at the same time allows them to challenge this requirement in court if it in any way violates the human rights legislation of the country where it is physically located. information. In addition, the law allows the US executive to negotiate bilaterally with foreign countries to provide the required data.

The law has been backed by major companies including Microsoft Apple and Google. However, he has been criticized by several human rights groups at once, including the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the American Civil Liberties Union and Human Rights Watch. In their opinion, the right of law enforcement agencies to negotiate directly with foreign powers, bypassing the American judicial system, is a violation of the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution.

Servers in Ireland

In 2013, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) launched an investigation into a drug trafficking scheme, during which it needed to view the correspondence of one of Microsoft users. The user was a US citizen, but the correspondence was stored on servers located in Ireland.

The FBI filed a warrant issued by a New York judge, but Microsoft still refused to provide the data. From a legal point of view, the company had the right to refuse, since the Stored Communications Act did not apply to data located outside the United States.

As the company explains, the data was located in Ireland because at that time it was Microsoft's policy to store information as close to the user's location as possible. The user interested in the FBI indicated Ireland as their location. Microsoft stores user information in approximately 100 data centers in 40 countries around the world.

Microsoft refused to provide the user's correspondence because just at that time a wave of distrust towards large IT corporations was spreading in the society, caused by the revelations of Edward Snowden, writes Bloomberg. More and more citizens began to believe that the US government was spying on them through Internet companies. This question especially worried foreign users. Therefore, at the same time, Microsoft allowed government and corporate customers to choose in which country they would like to store their information.

French precedent

Legally, Microsoft justified its refusal by a precedent that took place in France. When in 2015 the French government investigated the murder of an employee of the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo in Paris, the investigation required data that Microsoft stored in the United States.

But French law enforcement officers did not directly contact Microsoft, but first resolved this issue with the American government. As a result, at the request of the American authorities, the company provided the investigation with the attacker's correspondence within 45 minutes. Citing this precedent, Microsoft actually advised the FBI to contact the Irish authorities. But the right to conclude such transactions, US law enforcement officers received only with the adoption of the CLOUD Act.