Expert: Messengers simply ignore the new law

The State Duma adopted in the third reading a bill regulating the work of messengers. All their owners will be obliged to identify their users by phone number. The law provides for fines for owners of services who refuse to provide data on their users, and the messengers themselves can block. About how realized the conditions of this law are and whether users can bypass them, The Insider was told by Biolink.tech President Evgeny Chereshnev.

This is not entirely correct and honest with the business, because the phone number is, in fact, an identifier that is allocated by specific commercial companies. Specifically in Russia, this is MTS, Megafon, Beeline, MGTS, that is, those companies whose business is to provide a connection for money.

At the same time, there are other kinds of companies that also provide telecommunications services, they just sometimes do it for free, and sometimes for money. These are just commercial software messengers, for example, Telegram.

All of them develop independently, in natural competition, and each manufacturer decides how he identifies the user. In some cases, this may not be a phone number, but an account, as is done in the same Facebook. That is, the phone record has nothing to do with the phone, just like Facebook itself has nothing to do with MTS or MegaFon companies.

Accordingly, when the law prescribes mandatory identification in an imposed manner, this violates, first of all, the rules of honest competition. Why, suddenly, a private business should integrate the account of another business in its solutions. It turns out that he gives him access to his subscriber base and infrastructure.

It turns out that if the telephone number is used as an account, the owner of the number, in this case, the operator company gets access to the part of the personal data of this subscriber who is the private property of a particular business, for example, Telegram or WhatsApp, or Facebook-Mesenter and so on. And this is not entirely clear. In the thinnest formulation, this is called: "Why suddenly?"

The law has already been adopted and it must be carried out somehow. But to be honest, I don't quite understand how it will be fulfilled. Most likely, all messengers are now simply ignoring this law. The Russian market is not dominant in monetization for most commercial services. Roughly speaking, in terms of capacity, our market loses both the American, European, and Chinese. Our people are a rather specific audience.

When the messenger takes and integrates someone else's decision into his scheme, he subscribes to the fact that he must technically implement, support, protect, there are issues of cybersecurity, storage issues. That is, this is the cost, it is an additional bon. Accordingly, if the business understands that it is cheaper to close the service in Russia, if such a need arises than to support it, he will do it without hesitation, because the business earns money.

I don’t know what the people who worked on this law were counting on, because all this is a little strange. In fact, this law will be in most cases, because there is an opportunity to make not a messenger, but a new format of the communication method itself, which will be called somehow differently, and in fact the law will not apply to it.

I think that everything will come to this, because, once again: a business that makes money works in its own interests, it will not give data about its users to third parties, because these data are its only competitive advantage regarding other services. Therefore, this law is actually incorrect, wrong and not entirely correct from the point of view of competition.