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Russia Moves To Ban Online Services That Don’t Store Personal Data In Russia

162 points by tonymon 12y ago

huhtenberg 12y ago
It's a post-Snowden world, so I can't say I'm surprised nor that I think it's ridiculous. I also strongly suspect that EU will follow the suit shortly.
- jacquesm 12y ago
  The motivations Russia has for doing this are not currently present in the EU so I highly doubt that.
  - huhtenberg 12y ago
    Pray tell what these motivations are. Just talk through them and then ask yourself if they are in fact "not present" outside of Russia given all the NSA and GCHQ shenanigans that have surfaced.
    - jacquesm 12y ago
      This is all about their ability to censor and has nothing to do with the stated reasons (combating piracy / protecting the privacy of Russian citizens and other fig leafs). If you want to know the real motivations for this then it helps to remember Putin's origins and articles like this: http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/russia-telecoms-watchdog-warns-of-possible-twitter-ban/2014/05/16/a8c8bf98-77db-4bbb-8efe-d25a75de84ad_story.html http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/russia-telecoms-watchdog... The rest of Europe does not (for now) share any of those motivations with the Russian rulers.
      - huhtenberg 12y ago
        Is UK included in "the rest of Europe" by any chance? Besides if the censorship were the goal, then it's perfectly doable as of now and regardless of the physical location of the servers. Just ask Saudi's. To understand the motivation you have to stop reading Washington Times and looking at Putin's origins and instead consider what he has accomplished in recent years - he essentially resurrected the national pride. In this context, it's only logical that they now view their dependency on (mostly) US companies as unbecoming, especially in the light of Snowden revelations, hence the move in question. You may also recall the hocus-pocus Visa did not long ago by showing a middle finger to some Russian bank as per directive of the US department. Now, swap the US and Russia and consider what the US reaction would've been. If you are thinking it's all about censorship, you are missing a much larger picture.
        jacquesm 12y ago
        The UK is in many ways more of an extension of the US than a part of Europe and behaves accordingly. What the US's reaction would be if the situation was reversed is moot because that's not the world we currently live in. The fact is that Putin and his band of boyscouts are rapidly reverting to type and getting the communications between Russian citizens under their control is just another step in that play. If you think Putin has restored national pride then you are falling hook, line and sinker for the propaganda, that's just cheap talk for the consumption by the gullible. Pride you achieve by having something to be proud of, this is just warmed over nationalism.
- bedane 12y ago
  No, because the EU states with decision-making power are USA vassals since 1945
- jonnybgood 12y ago
  Outside bubbles such as HN and others on the internet, the post Snowden world doesn't exist. What you'll see is just grandstanding as it was with Germany. There is no benefit to the EU or rationale to take similar measures.
cyphunk 12y ago
It sounds evil but balkanisation of the Internet is a natural result of the erosion of trust in corporations and other stewards of this medium. The NSA/GCHQ scandal only pushed it a little further. We all know that any great medium starts out as a bastion of understanding, sharing and common good until a bunch of trolls show up to ruin it all (ahem, reddit, ycombinator, digg, etc). Until that moment we enjoy all the freedoms that such a medium offers and we assume it is something of and unto itself, never to be destroyed. In the Internet's case the trolls were capital coming to understand how to modify the Internet to extract wealth and governments looking for a competitive edge over others using the Internets structural flaws to obtain that edge. The erosion in this case is more harmful to many people than trolls showing up to reddit. So I think it's natural that people recede slightly from the idea a globalised common communal identity created by the Internet and look toward their national structures to protect them. As Snowden said in some QA "Our founding fathers did not say that all [US persons] were created equal". Until the irony of that statement is not cleared up internationally and human rights are absolutely universal balkanisation of the Internet will come. Russia, despite being an odd democracy, is only jumping onto a boat that already sailed in Brazil and other locations.
- walshemj 12y ago
  where the FSB can easily access it without those pesky court orders - this is part of Putins crackdown along with banning certain words from use period.
  - oddx 12y ago
    Secret court orders isn't problem in USA [1] nor UK [2], Russia only tries to keep up with Five Eyes. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Foreign_Intelligence_Surveillance_Court#Secret_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Foreign_Intellig... 2. http://www.theguardian.com/law/2012/apr/04/clarke-defends-secret-courts-plans-clegg http://www.theguardian.com/law/2012/apr/04/clarke-defends-se...
    - walshemj 12y ago
      Say what you will about the NSA SIS etc they at least do have some independent oversight.
therealunreal 12y ago
It's sad that it's spiraling down to this but it is in practice no different than what the US is doing. There's no free speech without privacy so this looks like a "choose your dictator" kind of thing.
- jacquesm 12y ago
  The difference here is that America does not care whether you store your data on services in Europe or Russia, but Russia does. Clearly in practice this is very different to what the US is doing.
  - tomp 12y ago
    Of course it doesn't because most, if not all, international internet services are actually based in the US, and there are laws/courts saying that US companies should give over data even if it's stored abroad. No other country has this kind of power, so it's reasonable that they try other ways of protecting their access to information.
  - dkarapetyan 12y ago
    The only reason we haven't cared up until now because it has all been stored here or within countries that have had very strong diplomatic ties to the United States. Plus, it doesn't really matter anyway because the internet backbones are all tapped. In any event I think Russia is just looking out for its own best interest by realizing that data needs to be managed and controlled like any other national resource.
- bayesianhorse 12y ago
  The US president has much less power over you than Putin has over Russians.
qwerta 12y ago
Europe has similar law (personal data should not leave Europe), but it is not as widely enforced. Edit: since I am getting down voted let me explain. > The EU Data Protection Directive requires that personal data a company collects can not be moved somewhere where the consumer will have weaker protections than in the EU. Practically it means that data can not be moved outside of EU, since they would be under different jurisdiction. For example court in EU must approve all data disclosures. If data are in US the disclosure could bypass courts in EU, there could be even gag order. Simply put, the EU can not enforce its law in foreign countries. Safe Harbor and similar are nice in theory, but it still does not put them under EU jurisdiction. BTW: Irish Google got sued already for sharing data with american mother-ship.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
- jib 12y ago
  The EU laws allows for data to leave assuming you follow guidelines that makes sure the EU laws around privacy are respected in the country the data is exported to.
- vidarh 12y ago
  Not quite. The EU Data Protection Directive requires that personal data a company collects can not be moved somewhere where the consumer will have weaker protections than in the EU. This has required some workarounds, such as "safe harbour" provisions that US companies need to accept in order to receive personal data from EU companies that have collected them from users, which basically boils down to that the US company need to agree to comply with the same basic rules as if the data had stayed in the EU. End users can pass their data to whomever, whether or not they comply with these rules.
  - qwerta 12y ago
    But US companies are target to NSA survailence and data disclosure, so they can not comply with EU regulations by definition.
davidjgraph 12y ago
Aside from the politics, this causes me to have 2 questions: 1) Are there any cloud file storage systems along the Drive/DB lines in Russia that apps providers can integrate with? 2) Not that anyone here knows the answer, but will the cloud storage providers implement data routing that complies with these rules (I guess yes, if the money is worth it)? If anyone here is interested in country specific SaaS integrations (Germany, Brazil and Russia, for example), my email in profile.
- tonymon 12y ago
  1) Yes, there is. For example Selectel: http://selectel.com/services/cloud-storage/ http://selectel.com/services/cloud-storage/ based on OpenStack API, very easy to integrate. >Data storage ~0.088$ for 1GB per month or ~0.131$ for 1 TB per hour >Network (outgoing traffic) ~0.023$ per 1GB >Network (incoming traffic) free-of-charge They also recently announced CDN option with Akamai partnership at no additional cost
abc123xyz 12y ago
While at 143 million people Russia has the largest population, this is rapidly shrinking, Russian internet (runet as they call it) was already mostly balkanised mainly due to language. I find it amusing that they are doing this in "the name of combating piracy" when right now a certain russian site is hosting 1.2 million (mostly western) pirated ebooks and 28 million pirated scientific articles
- watwut 12y ago
  I do not think stated reason is necessary the same as the real reason. Real reason is more likely to have to do with control over local population, possibly with trying not to export local data to outside world (e.g. national security) and is likely an attempt to give an advantage to local companies. Combating piracy is just something west is supposed to react more positively at.
- insuffi 12y ago
  Except birth rate in Russia has been rapidly increasing in the last 14 years. They are making steps to legalize content, such as vkontakte legalizing 70% of their media material.
  - vitalique 12y ago
    Yay teen pregnancy!
    - guard-of-terra 12y ago
      Nope, it isn't. First birth age is growing like everywhere in post-transit countries. (This also leads to statistics under-predicting birth rate)
senthilnayagam 12y ago
china & russia already have its own facebook, twitter, google clone, will India and Brazil join the party, thats the question to ask
ThePhysicist 12y ago
Brilliant move: Protect the Russian citizens from foreign government spying by making sure that all their data stays in their own country under the protection of their democratic government. Oh wait...
- bottled_poe 12y ago
  What makes you think that a democratic government is different from any other system of government in this regard? It's funny how ideology and reality never seem to align, isn't it?
  - ThePhysicist 12y ago
    In fact I was trying to suggest that Russia is NOT a democratic country and that hosting user data within their territory will probably mostly serve the intelligence needs of the Russian secret service (FSB).
- davidjgraph 12y ago
  I don't agree. The difference is you vote for your own government (Russia has a democratic voting system, how the candidates are selected...well...). If you vote in a government that does that to its people, that's your business. Foreign governments owe you nothing, you can't reasonably complain about them abusing your rights if you put them in a position where they can.
  - bayesianhorse 12y ago
    It's not democracy unless quite a few conditions are met. Elections alone aren't satisfactory. Unless there is free speech, (completely) universal suffrage and honest authorities, there can't be a democracy. Russia restricts free speech and universal suffrage through relatively "efficient" means, compared with China. Putin ensures his power with a lot less effort than the CCP. Also "honesty" in Russian authorities is something of a bad joke...
    - gtirloni 12y ago
4k 12y ago
I think the problem with privacy violation is twofold. 1) Protecting Citizen's data from snooping attempts of foreign intelligence agencies. Which is state's responsibility imo, which in this case it's carrying out. In this regard, this is good news, 2) Protecting Citizen's data from the state itself. This is a particularly tricky one, since there's no government agency which acts as counterweight to the intelligence agencies. In this regard, I am not so sure if its good news. What if this law was only passed to enable Russian intelligence agencies to gain easy access to all the citizen's data? Which seems plausible and predatory (nobody spies on our Citizens but us). It will probably take a combination of Technological and Legal changes to really ensure privacy of the people. I can see how it could possibly come about. There's a small set of people (read Big Government) who want to maintain control over Citizens by compromising their privacy. There's a big set of people who stand to get harmed by privacy violations. But there is a third set of people who has influence on first set (read wealthy class in all its forms), but who also stands to lose from privacy violations, and who also has means to fight it legally and legislatively. The third class would probably be the drivers of privacy reforms we'll see in coming years/decades.
- alexro 12y ago
  Russian intelligence agencies had access to everything all along. Every big telecom in Russia is obliged to implement the necessary procedures.
  - omgtehlion 12y ago
    Even not that big telcos have to install SORM h/w. At their own expense of course...
Grue3 12y ago
>it would take effect in September 2016 Great, so now I have a deadline to get out of here. Anyone hiring?
ajb 12y ago
Any hosting companies in Kaliningrad? :-)
- homhomhom 12y ago
  There are plenty of hosting companies operating in Russia for Russian market. It's not rocket science.
tempodox 12y ago
This does make sense from a purely logical point of view. If personal data is to be exploited and plundered, at least make sure it's done by your own villains under the control of your own laws. Why volunteer anything to the competing spy agencies?
AndrewDucker 12y ago
I'm wondering if this is a direct attack on Livejournal, which is still incredibly popular in Russia, used for political dissent, and hosted in the US...
PeterGriffin 12y ago
This will be enforced only against companies big enough to be on Russia government's radar. Big companies already have content distribution networks and server farms all over the world. And since Russia is hardly the first country to pass such a law, Google, Microsoft, Amazon and many others have already had algorithms in place to ensure user data stays local for certain countries. Now they'll just add Russia to the list.
ganwar 12y ago
Russia as a country sees storage of internet data as a tactical disadvantage against US. They are only moving ahead to level the playing field as much as they can.
- dkarapetyan 12y ago
  Yup, politicians are starting to realize that digital data in all its forms is now a competitive advantage and they are looking to control it like any other national resource.
dkarapetyan 12y ago
Makes sense. Data at this point is as much of a economic competitive advantage as anything else and managing it like any other national resources makes a lot of sense.
th3iedkid 12y ago
such laws can create good employment opportunities for local people and can effect economy in a positive way too!
ulfw 12y ago
And so it begins...
dschiptsov 12y ago
What would one expect from "Bydlostan". Russia has been destroyed in 1917, USSR in 1991.) Pelevin (the best modern Russian writer) came up with another more appropriate name - "Patsaneriya". This "protection" of personal data is the same as "protection" of Russian-speaking in Crymea - just an excuse for a grab.
hexleo 12y ago
>The Russian government has moved one step closer towards a “China-like” approach towards Internet services. Bad news for Russian. In China sometimes you want to use google to search something is deny. We use some software to cross the "Great Fire Wall" to see the whole world.
Nux 12y ago
Beyond all the bad sides, this could be good for the local economy/providers.
dattanin 12y ago
May be i am missing something, but having servers in one country's border doesn't mean that data is not available to those whom you don't trust. How does this fit in a proactive strategy to identity theft or similar things.

162 points by tonymon 12y ago

It's a post-Snowden world, so I can't say I'm surprised nor that I think it's ridiculous. I also strongly suspect that EU will follow the suit shortly.

jacquesm 12y ago
The motivations Russia has for doing this are not currently present in the EU so I highly doubt that.
- huhtenberg 12y ago
  Pray tell what these motivations are. Just talk through them and then ask yourself if they are in fact "not present" outside of Russia given all the NSA and GCHQ shenanigans that have surfaced.
  - jacquesm 12y ago
    This is all about their ability to censor and has nothing to do with the stated reasons (combating piracy / protecting the privacy of Russian citizens and other fig leafs). If you want to know the real motivations for this then it helps to remember Putin's origins and articles like this: http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/russia-telecoms-watchdog-warns-of-possible-twitter-ban/2014/05/16/a8c8bf98-77db-4bbb-8efe-d25a75de84ad_story.html http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/russia-telecoms-watchdog... The rest of Europe does not (for now) share any of those motivations with the Russian rulers.
    - huhtenberg 12y ago
      Is UK included in "the rest of Europe" by any chance? Besides if the censorship were the goal, then it's perfectly doable as of now and regardless of the physical location of the servers. Just ask Saudi's. To understand the motivation you have to stop reading Washington Times and looking at Putin's origins and instead consider what he has accomplished in recent years - he essentially resurrected the national pride. In this context, it's only logical that they now view their dependency on (mostly) US companies as unbecoming, especially in the light of Snowden revelations, hence the move in question. You may also recall the hocus-pocus Visa did not long ago by showing a middle finger to some Russian bank as per directive of the US department. Now, swap the US and Russia and consider what the US reaction would've been. If you are thinking it's all about censorship, you are missing a much larger picture.
      - jacquesm 12y ago
        The UK is in many ways more of an extension of the US than a part of Europe and behaves accordingly. What the US's reaction would be if the situation was reversed is moot because that's not the world we currently live in. The fact is that Putin and his band of boyscouts are rapidly reverting to type and getting the communications between Russian citizens under their control is just another step in that play. If you think Putin has restored national pride then you are falling hook, line and sinker for the propaganda, that's just cheap talk for the consumption by the gullible. Pride you achieve by having something to be proud of, this is just warmed over nationalism.
bedane 12y ago
No, because the EU states with decision-making power are USA vassals since 1945
jonnybgood 12y ago
Outside bubbles such as HN and others on the internet, the post Snowden world doesn't exist. What you'll see is just grandstanding as it was with Germany. There is no benefit to the EU or rationale to take similar measures.

cyphunk 12y ago

It sounds evil but balkanisation of the Internet is a natural result of the erosion of trust in corporations and other stewards of this medium. The NSA/GCHQ scandal only pushed it a little further. We all know that any great medium starts out as a bastion of understanding, sharing and common good until a bunch of trolls show up to ruin it all (ahem, reddit, ycombinator, digg, etc). Until that moment we enjoy all the freedoms that such a medium offers and we assume it is something of and unto itself, never to be destroyed. In the Internet's case the trolls were capital coming to understand how to modify the Internet to extract wealth and governments looking for a competitive edge over others using the Internets structural flaws to obtain that edge. The erosion in this case is more harmful to many people than trolls showing up to reddit. So I think it's natural that people recede slightly from the idea a globalised common communal identity created by the Internet and look toward their national structures to protect them. As Snowden said in some QA "Our founding fathers did not say that all [US persons] were created equal". Until the irony of that statement is not cleared up internationally and human rights are absolutely universal balkanisation of the Internet will come. Russia, despite being an odd democracy, is only jumping onto a boat that already sailed in Brazil and other locations.

walshemj 12y ago
where the FSB can easily access it without those pesky court orders - this is part of Putins crackdown along with banning certain words from use period.
- oddx 12y ago
  Secret court orders isn't problem in USA [1] nor UK [2], Russia only tries to keep up with Five Eyes. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Foreign_Intelligence_Surveillance_Court#Secret_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Foreign_Intellig... 2. http://www.theguardian.com/law/2012/apr/04/clarke-defends-secret-courts-plans-clegg http://www.theguardian.com/law/2012/apr/04/clarke-defends-se...
  - walshemj 12y ago
    Say what you will about the NSA SIS etc they at least do have some independent oversight.

therealunreal 12y ago

It's sad that it's spiraling down to this but it is in practice no different than what the US is doing. There's no free speech without privacy so this looks like a "choose your dictator" kind of thing.

jacquesm 12y ago
The difference here is that America does not care whether you store your data on services in Europe or Russia, but Russia does. Clearly in practice this is very different to what the US is doing.
- tomp 12y ago
  Of course it doesn't because most, if not all, international internet services are actually based in the US, and there are laws/courts saying that US companies should give over data even if it's stored abroad. No other country has this kind of power, so it's reasonable that they try other ways of protecting their access to information.
- dkarapetyan 12y ago
  The only reason we haven't cared up until now because it has all been stored here or within countries that have had very strong diplomatic ties to the United States. Plus, it doesn't really matter anyway because the internet backbones are all tapped. In any event I think Russia is just looking out for its own best interest by realizing that data needs to be managed and controlled like any other national resource.
bayesianhorse 12y ago
The US president has much less power over you than Putin has over Russians.

qwerta 12y ago

Europe has similar law (personal data should not leave Europe), but it is not as widely enforced. Edit: since I am getting down voted let me explain. > The EU Data Protection Directive requires that personal data a company collects can not be moved somewhere where the consumer will have weaker protections than in the EU. Practically it means that data can not be moved outside of EU, since they would be under different jurisdiction. For example court in EU must approve all data disclosures. If data are in US the disclosure could bypass courts in EU, there could be even gag order. Simply put, the EU can not enforce its law in foreign countries. Safe Harbor and similar are nice in theory, but it still does not put them under EU jurisdiction. BTW: Irish Google got sued already for sharing data with american mother-ship.

deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
jib 12y ago
The EU laws allows for data to leave assuming you follow guidelines that makes sure the EU laws around privacy are respected in the country the data is exported to.
vidarh 12y ago
Not quite. The EU Data Protection Directive requires that personal data a company collects can not be moved somewhere where the consumer will have weaker protections than in the EU. This has required some workarounds, such as "safe harbour" provisions that US companies need to accept in order to receive personal data from EU companies that have collected them from users, which basically boils down to that the US company need to agree to comply with the same basic rules as if the data had stayed in the EU. End users can pass their data to whomever, whether or not they comply with these rules.
- qwerta 12y ago
  But US companies are target to NSA survailence and data disclosure, so they can not comply with EU regulations by definition.

davidjgraph 12y ago

Aside from the politics, this causes me to have 2 questions: 1) Are there any cloud file storage systems along the Drive/DB lines in Russia that apps providers can integrate with? 2) Not that anyone here knows the answer, but will the cloud storage providers implement data routing that complies with these rules (I guess yes, if the money is worth it)? If anyone here is interested in country specific SaaS integrations (Germany, Brazil and Russia, for example), my email in profile.

tonymon 12y ago
1) Yes, there is. For example Selectel: http://selectel.com/services/cloud-storage/ http://selectel.com/services/cloud-storage/ based on OpenStack API, very easy to integrate. >Data storage ~0.088$ for 1GB per month or ~0.131$ for 1 TB per hour >Network (outgoing traffic) ~0.023$ per 1GB >Network (incoming traffic) free-of-charge They also recently announced CDN option with Akamai partnership at no additional cost

abc123xyz 12y ago

While at 143 million people Russia has the largest population, this is rapidly shrinking, Russian internet (runet as they call it) was already mostly balkanised mainly due to language. I find it amusing that they are doing this in "the name of combating piracy" when right now a certain russian site is hosting 1.2 million (mostly western) pirated ebooks and 28 million pirated scientific articles

watwut 12y ago
I do not think stated reason is necessary the same as the real reason. Real reason is more likely to have to do with control over local population, possibly with trying not to export local data to outside world (e.g. national security) and is likely an attempt to give an advantage to local companies. Combating piracy is just something west is supposed to react more positively at.
insuffi 12y ago
Except birth rate in Russia has been rapidly increasing in the last 14 years. They are making steps to legalize content, such as vkontakte legalizing 70% of their media material.
- vitalique 12y ago
  Yay teen pregnancy!
  - guard-of-terra 12y ago
    Nope, it isn't. First birth age is growing like everywhere in post-transit countries. (This also leads to statistics under-predicting birth rate)

senthilnayagam 12y ago

china & russia already have its own facebook, twitter, google clone, will India and Brazil join the party, thats the question to ask

ThePhysicist 12y ago

Brilliant move: Protect the Russian citizens from foreign government spying by making sure that all their data stays in their own country under the protection of their democratic government. Oh wait...

bottled_poe 12y ago
What makes you think that a democratic government is different from any other system of government in this regard? It's funny how ideology and reality never seem to align, isn't it?
- ThePhysicist 12y ago
  In fact I was trying to suggest that Russia is NOT a democratic country and that hosting user data within their territory will probably mostly serve the intelligence needs of the Russian secret service (FSB).
davidjgraph 12y ago
I don't agree. The difference is you vote for your own government (Russia has a democratic voting system, how the candidates are selected...well...). If you vote in a government that does that to its people, that's your business. Foreign governments owe you nothing, you can't reasonably complain about them abusing your rights if you put them in a position where they can.
- bayesianhorse 12y ago
  It's not democracy unless quite a few conditions are met. Elections alone aren't satisfactory. Unless there is free speech, (completely) universal suffrage and honest authorities, there can't be a democracy. Russia restricts free speech and universal suffrage through relatively "efficient" means, compared with China. Putin ensures his power with a lot less effort than the CCP. Also "honesty" in Russian authorities is something of a bad joke...
  - gtirloni 12y ago

4k 12y ago

I think the problem with privacy violation is twofold. 1) Protecting Citizen's data from snooping attempts of foreign intelligence agencies. Which is state's responsibility imo, which in this case it's carrying out. In this regard, this is good news, 2) Protecting Citizen's data from the state itself. This is a particularly tricky one, since there's no government agency which acts as counterweight to the intelligence agencies. In this regard, I am not so sure if its good news. What if this law was only passed to enable Russian intelligence agencies to gain easy access to all the citizen's data? Which seems plausible and predatory (nobody spies on our Citizens but us). It will probably take a combination of Technological and Legal changes to really ensure privacy of the people. I can see how it could possibly come about. There's a small set of people (read Big Government) who want to maintain control over Citizens by compromising their privacy. There's a big set of people who stand to get harmed by privacy violations. But there is a third set of people who has influence on first set (read wealthy class in all its forms), but who also stands to lose from privacy violations, and who also has means to fight it legally and legislatively. The third class would probably be the drivers of privacy reforms we'll see in coming years/decades.

alexro 12y ago
Russian intelligence agencies had access to everything all along. Every big telecom in Russia is obliged to implement the necessary procedures.
- omgtehlion 12y ago
  Even not that big telcos have to install SORM h/w. At their own expense of course...

Grue3 12y ago

>it would take effect in September 2016 Great, so now I have a deadline to get out of here. Anyone hiring?

ajb 12y ago

Any hosting companies in Kaliningrad? :-)

homhomhom 12y ago
There are plenty of hosting companies operating in Russia for Russian market. It's not rocket science.

tempodox 12y ago

This does make sense from a purely logical point of view. If personal data is to be exploited and plundered, at least make sure it's done by your own villains under the control of your own laws. Why volunteer anything to the competing spy agencies?

AndrewDucker 12y ago

I'm wondering if this is a direct attack on Livejournal, which is still incredibly popular in Russia, used for political dissent, and hosted in the US...

PeterGriffin 12y ago

This will be enforced only against companies big enough to be on Russia government's radar. Big companies already have content distribution networks and server farms all over the world. And since Russia is hardly the first country to pass such a law, Google, Microsoft, Amazon and many others have already had algorithms in place to ensure user data stays local for certain countries. Now they'll just add Russia to the list.

ganwar 12y ago

Russia as a country sees storage of internet data as a tactical disadvantage against US. They are only moving ahead to level the playing field as much as they can.

dkarapetyan 12y ago
Yup, politicians are starting to realize that digital data in all its forms is now a competitive advantage and they are looking to control it like any other national resource.

dkarapetyan 12y ago

Makes sense. Data at this point is as much of a economic competitive advantage as anything else and managing it like any other national resources makes a lot of sense.

th3iedkid 12y ago

such laws can create good employment opportunities for local people and can effect economy in a positive way too!

ulfw 12y ago

And so it begins...

dschiptsov 12y ago

What would one expect from "Bydlostan". Russia has been destroyed in 1917, USSR in 1991.) Pelevin (the best modern Russian writer) came up with another more appropriate name - "Patsaneriya". This "protection" of personal data is the same as "protection" of Russian-speaking in Crymea - just an excuse for a grab.

hexleo 12y ago

>The Russian government has moved one step closer towards a “China-like” approach towards Internet services. Bad news for Russian. In China sometimes you want to use google to search something is deny. We use some software to cross the "Great Fire Wall" to see the whole world.

Nux 12y ago

Beyond all the bad sides, this could be good for the local economy/providers.

dattanin 12y ago

May be i am missing something, but having servers in one country's border doesn't mean that data is not available to those whom you don't trust. How does this fit in a proactive strategy to identity theft or similar things.