Russia’s Head of Federal Service for Supervision in the Sphere of Telecom, Information Technologies, and Mass Communications Alexander Zharov has announced Russia’s regulatory plan to impose hefty fines on big tech companies that flout its regulations.
Zharov made this known at the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum that took place from the 6th to 8th of June , 2019.
Among the items constituting the new regulations is that Big Tech companies should have their servers and data physically located in Russia, failure to do so, though the new bill has not been passed to law, will attract very big fines.
According to Zharov, the bill is almost ready and that he, personally, hoped it would be made law soon. The other part that the new law will impose fines for on companies like Facebook, Twitter, and Google is when they violate Russian laws around the handling of users’ personal data.
The latest development is not peculiar to Russia as more African countries are having data centers created. It is believed that hosting locally made servers and data centers are pertinent as it will go a long way to protect the data sovereignty of these countries.Furthermore, as is the case with Russia, it means states can be able to take Big Tech companies to account legally if they fail to comply with local information protection laws.
Russia had clamped down on Linkedin in the country in 2016 after the business and employment-oriented service declined to store data on its Russian users on servers hosted in Russia. More recently, Russia’s communications regulator put together a database called the Register of Information Dissemination Organizations (ORI).
According to reports, the database of 176 online services from around the world was made public when Russian authorities requested online dating service, Tinder, to hand over data on some Russian users. Tinder had refused the request.