Russian telecoms head would rather be taxed extra than comply with new ‘Big-Brother’ legislation

In an interview with the newspaper Kommersant this week, the CEO of the telecoms company Megafon, Sergey Soldatenkov, proposed a new tax on mobile operators meant to finance the onerous new regulations placed on “organizers of information distribution” by laws Vladimir Putin signed yesterday.

Now companies like Megafon, Beeline, and MTS will have to store records of all calls and text messages exchanged between customers for a period of six months. And for three years, the companies will need to keep the metadata on all calls and text messages (the information about when and between whom messages occurred, but not the actual content of the messages). The new regulations will take effect on July 1, 2018.

Soldatenkov says the new tax should amount to roughly 1 percent of telecoms' annual revenue. This, he speculates, should be enough to pay for new data-storage centers and other equipment necessary to meet the comply with Russia's new regulations. The tax is intended to transfer the implementation burden from telecoms companies to the Russian government. “This is not our responsibility,” Soldatnikov argued, saying the new data-storage requirements are “unfamiliar” to phone and Internet companies.

“We will be unable to fulfill the requirements of law in the way that it exists at present,” said Soldatenkov, who clarified that this new operation would require the company to invest 200 billion rubles annually (more than $3 billion), despite the fact that its net annual profit is only 50 billion rubles ($780 million).

• For more about the technical impracticalities of these new regulations, see: *The Duma’s new ‘Big-Brother’ legislation kills Russia’s Internet companies and hurts ordinary Web users. Here’s how.*