The path of development of the Internet in Russia. What may result from amendments to the law on personal data. Automatic translate

On July 4, 2014, the State Duma of the Russian Federation adopted in the second and third reading amendments to the law on information obliging Internet companies wishing to work in Russia to store personal data of Russian users on the territory of the Russian Federation. In this regard, questions from the users of the site about the consequences of these innovations. Let’s get it together. The questions of Sergey Fateev are answered by Dmitry Ermolaev (Gallerix.ru).

- The main questions: Why is this being done and who benefits from it?

The deputies who proposed these amendments answered the question “why is this done” many times - our government wants to have control over the actions of Russian users on the Internet, on any sites, including large foreign social networks. And if some site refuses to fulfill the requests and instructions of the Russian law enforcement agencies - to have a serious trump card in a conversation with its representatives - in the form of disconnecting data servers. That is, in practice, this is a circuit breaker capable of disconnecting all Russian accounts in bulk upon a command from Roskomnadzor. Or block access to the site if the site does not respond to teams from Roskomnadzor.

I think that the success of the bill in the State Duma was also led by events in Ukraine, where power was overthrown, among other things, due to the participation and support of the broad masses of people, the best information and agitation of which is achieved today through social network. The media is already under state control. Other examples - Turkey, Egypt - where mass unrest was organized on the western sites of Facebook and Twitter. Foreign social networks for the state are an uncontrolled sector and they pose for it a real threat of mass communication of people with each other.

The question of finding a beneficiary is, in fact, also interesting. We will wait for the comments of experts on international relations to hear the answer to the question whether there is a connection between the speed of adoption of this bill and Western sanctions against Russia. It is possible that this is one of the small bricks from which the answer to the west is built.

Here are the statistics on the placement of Russian domains by hosting providers. This is the latest data from Reg.ru as of July 2014:

Link to the report: http://statonline.ru/metrics/hosting?tld=en

Here is the whole main economic component of this issue and a whole list of interested parties. As you can see, the German hosting company is leading, and by a wide margin, the German company Hetzner Online, which owns two large data centers in Europe - in Nuremberg and Falkenstein. By the way, there are also the main servers of the Gallerix.ru project.

Think about it - only one German hosting provider physically has 241 thousand Russian sites. Two hundred and forty-one thousand sites. Moreover, there are no statistics on that part of Russian sites that are located on international domains (.com,.org,.info, etc.) and other Russian domains (.su,.rf, etc.). And there is.by and, for example,.kz, most of whose audience is also a Russian visitor and, if necessary, they may also be forced to physically move to Russia.

And even more - the chart reflects only the Top 20 providers, but does not contain figures for the remaining several thousand hosting providers, among which there are a lot of both Russian and foreign. That is, the total figure, in fact, may be one and a half to two times more.

The adopted amendments are likely to lead to a gradual redistribution of shares in the Russian hosting pie in favor of local companies.

- And why is the Russian Internet business so often choosing a German hosting? What is the difference from ours?

Anecdote to the topic: “Here you are a patriot, why do you drive a foreign car? “But you should not confuse patriotism with idiocy!”

Of course there are differences - this is the price and quality. Hetzner has an excellent (fast) channel to both Russia and the rest of the world, very high quality of the service provided from a technical point of view, pedantic technical support in German and, most importantly, very favorable rates for all this. The cost of moving servers, for example, the Gallerix project to Russia, will cost us hosting services at least 4-5 times more expensive. Any person can imagine how something vital for him that he spends every month at the initiative of a couple of “people’s” deputies will now cost five times more, but with worse quality. Do you like this initiative?

- Specify specifically what ordinary users will face? How can the new amendments affect the work of regular sites, in particular, Gallerix.ru?

Two years are ahead and new amendments and clarifications may appear to the law. The most important thing that is not clear at the moment is the very concept of “personal data”. For example, Gallerix does not have anything in its database that can be called someone else’s “personal data”. Except, perhaps, the phone numbers of those users who prefer to bind them to their account (this is not necessary with us).

With vague wording in the adopted version of the law, almost all sites that are currently hosted abroad fall under it. That is, starting from September 1, 2016, Roskomnadzor can block any sites and will be right under the law.

The first in line, of course, the rebellious Twitter and Facebook. Surely, they will be blocked for the appearance of "extremist" posts, and then everything will depend on the degree of their interest in the Russian audience. I personally doubt very much that Facebook will abandon Russia. Well, or maybe I really hope that he doesn’t refuse.

An incomprehensible nuance is the question of how, in fact, Roskomnadzor plans to verify the implementation of the law. It is absolutely certain that, under no circumstances, not a single large foreign Internet company will provide Russian officials with access to its internal data streams. Let’s say Twitter is building a small DC in Moscow and sends a report to Roskomnadzor that the data of users from Russia are now stored in encrypted form there. Very good, but what happens next?

Many large (and medium) Internet projects have front-servers in Russia. We also have them, Russian users receive part of the Gallerix.ru content from servers physically located in the Russian Federation. Those. We have relations with Russian hosting providers, there really is stored operational information. If necessary, the user database Gallerix.ru can be relocated to the Moscow DC within, say, 72 hours. So our users, voiced changes to the rules of the game, most likely will not be affected.

But what will happen to hotel reservations and plastic card service is hard to say right now. The transfer of personal information during these processes definitely goes to their sites and in the current version of the law, access to such sites is subject to blocking.

I can assume that large aggregators that adjust to the law may benefit. For example, if Booking.com does this, it can even increase the number of bookings from Russia: hotel sites when they discover the direct service to Russians can simply block, and small hotels will definitely not organize information storage in Russia.

- Recently closed access to some resources. Loopholes appeared immediately on how to get around this. Many shared these methods. How will it be now? Are there similar methods? Will the satellite Internet technically help in this?

“The first rule of the Fight Club is to not tell anyone about the Fight Club.” Naturally, ways to circumvent laws will be suppressed, and on the basis of laws already adopted. The more information and references there are about a particular service or a way to circumvent restrictions, the higher will be the likelihood of blocking access to this particular service. In principle, yes, it’s very easy to get around the blocking of resources by Roskomnadzor today. But, on the other hand, if the webmaster has not fulfilled the requirements, such blocking instantly kills the site through the absence of visitors. Since there are only a few users who will do some kind of gestures to get to a blocked resource.

Satellite access is a bypass not only of the Roskomnadzor list, but also of local Internet providers. Those. normal access to the Internet through foreign suppliers. If I’m not mistaken, for example, Google is now building a network of satellites to deliver content in this way. Technically, it’s a very difficult and expensive way, so it is unlikely to be widespread. Well, again, the vulnerable issue of paying for these services…

- Your forecast, will we really get a “country without the Internet” in 2016? What will happen next?

If the state launched an attack on our freedoms on the Internet, it will not stop there. This law is not the first and certainly not the last. For the first half of this year alone, Roskomnadzor has already blocked two and a half thousand sites "for extremist statements," there is no reason to have any illusions.

Many great services will surely be fine-tuned and the locks will not be completely universal. But this will definitely create noticeable inconvenience for us: some of the sites will be inaccessible to us and this part will constantly increase, narrowing the Internet space available to us.

The following laws may, for example, limit our access to large Western media. They, for example, may be required, upon reaching a certain threshold of attendance, to be registered as mass media in Russia. The procedure is not quick, but not complicated, however, no one from abroad will do this, as a result, another cut segment will appear.

Surely there will be thematic locks. For example, resources with “adult” content may be banned (what Mizulina is talking about now). This will be another nail in the coffin of the Internet in Russia, because under the "adult" definition it will be possible to pull up a large number of entertainment and cultural sites that are in no way connected with the "adult" industries. For example, in relation to the Gallerix website, the question “is it a porn resource” has already been discussed several times. It is impossible to imagine the paintings of old masters without nudity - this is on every second painting 300-500 years ago.

Our “people’s” deputies often mention the issue of fully personalized access to the network. Surely, sooner or later, they will return to this issue in more detail. After that, in order to climb on the Internet outside of state sites, we will probably already be going abroad.

All this will certainly lead to an unprecedented brain drain from Russia. First of all, the most advanced young people for whom access to the Internet matters will leave for free countries.

These are the worst forecasts, which, however, at the moment seem quite real.