The Ministry of Digital Development, Communications and Mass Media published a new draft bill that obliges data-centre operators to transmit information about their equipment to Roskomnadzor.
Among the information to be transmitted are data on the land plots occupied by data centres (DCs), the number of rack spaces, their utilisation, capacity, the parameters of data storage systems, the services offered and the tariffs.
According to the document, the data will be forwarded to the Centre for Monitoring and Management of the Public Communications Network, which will be created under the sovereign runet law. The information is also planned to be transmitted to other agencies “to ensure the availability of communications services, and to monitor their quality.”
Until now, the notion of data-centre operators had not been codified in law.
It is unclear which data centres will be affected by the draft bill, but experts note that part of the collected information is commercially sensitive.
According to Artem Kozlyuk, head of the public organisation RosKomSvoboda, the new draft bill will not seriously affect the mining sector, but it threatens excessive centralisation of information:
“This pain point could be exploited by interested third parties, including security services and criminal elements. In my view, this is an excessive and dangerous demand.”
The draft bill obliges disclosure of which services are provided, as well as the prices for them, explains the CEO of data-centre Six Nines, Sergey Troshin. According to him, this would be useful for the governmental body that oversees the communications infrastructure.
“However, any initiative to report to the state any additional information is met with hostility, and often not without justification. Indirect information about a large amount of capacity, pointing to GPUs, could trigger checks to see whether mining is taking place in a data centre? Mining is not prohibited yet, but as an option, additional taxes could be imposed,” the expert says.
Troshin adds that other countries do not collect reports on equipment, as it is on the balance sheet by default:
“The tax authorities receive information about what type of equipment it is and how it is depreciated, and then compare it with the company’s financial indicators. In other words, all “white” equipment on the balance sheet is already known to the state.”
As noted earlier, the law on the sovereign runet came into force on 1 November 2019. It allows Roskomnadzor to collect information about infrastructure and existing IP addresses of companies, maintain a registry of traffic-exchange points, and, if necessary, adjust traffic routing.
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