The Ministry of Economic Development proposed compensating to the operators the costs of the "Law of the Yarova"

The Ministry of Economic Development proposes to compensate to operators the costs of implementing the Yarovaya Law from the Universal Communications Fund. This was reported by Vedomosti with reference to the letter of the deputy head of the department of Nikolai Podguzov to the government apparatus.

According to the publication, the support of communication operators "taking into account the need to prevent the growth of tariffs for communication services above the inflation level" During the implementation of the Yarova Law, "is prescribed in a closed part of the presidential instructions. They were given last summer, after the signing of "anti -terrorist amendments." According to the open part of the document, the FSB and the government by November 1 had to prepare draft regulatory acts aimed at minimizing possible risks from the implementation of the law.

The Universal Communications Fund is formed from the deductions of all Russian operators. There are 1.2 percent of their revenue. With this money, PJSC Rostelecom finances a project to eliminate "digital inequality", including builds communication lines and access points in sparsely populated regions. The project was underfunded and for a long time was implemented at the expense of Rostelecom itself. In particular, in 2016, the operator did not receive about 7 billion rubles from the planned 14.8 billion from the Universal Service Fund.

On January 19, an expert working group under the government, headed by the Minister of Open Government Mikhail Abyzov, rejected the petition of the abolition of the Yarovaya Law , which gathered 100 thousand votes. According to experts, the law fully complies with the constitution and does not violate the rights of citizens. In parallel, experts noted that the relevant departments are working on a “significant” mitigation of the law, which will avoid overdate.

At the meeting, the Deputy Minister of Communications and Mass Communications, Alexei Volin said that the agency proposes to reduce the volume of information that telecom operators are obliged to maintain according to the Yarova Law. "The Ministry of Communications and Mass Communications, together with the Ministry of Industry and the departments of the power bloc, held a large number of meetings and consultations aimed at reducing the costs of the industry, which stemmed from this text of the law," said Wolin. "First of all, the work was aimed at reducing the storage of excess information."

According to the deputy minister, today there is an agreement and understanding that "the volumes of information can be reduced by about 10 times." "Excessive information includes Internet media, IP-TV, torrents and a number of other difficult information resources for storing information resources," said Volin.

However, with a reduced storage, according to the experts of the Ministry of Communications and the Ministry of Industry, the costs of operators in the fulfillment of the requirements of the law will be used by about one hundred billion rubles. Volin noted that it will take about two years to coordinate the phased implementation of the law.

Ruslan Ibragimov, vice president of MTS for corporate and legal issues, said that the costs will be four times more. "If the entire law is fulfilled as it is, then the costs of MTS together with the MGTS are about 1.7 trillion rubles. After I saw in the expert opinion a proposal to reduce traffic and volumes by about 80 percent, we tried to calculate what costs for us during this case. It is more than 400 billion rubles for us," Ibrahimov noted. The annual revenue of the MTS group in Russia in 2015 amounted to 391.2 billion rubles.