Project of law on state regulation of internet: decision not taken
On the 17th of January, the Verkhovna Rada had rating ballot over the projects of law 3549-1, 3549-3and 3549-4. The bills got 170 votes for, so the legislative texts failed to be passed.
But to my mind, this fact has some deep hidden motives.
One should remind that the projects of law 3549, 3549-1, 3549-2, 3549-3, 3549-4 are different variants of the bill “On electronic communications” which is to be adopted in the framework of implementation of several Acts of the European Union in the sphere of electronic communications , according to the Association Agreement between the European Union and Ukraine. The projects of law were prepared by different MPs and from different positions, but these texts are to introduce a state regulation of internet network.
The main project of law is 3549, it was supposed to regulate the activity of all internet service providers under surveillance of the National commission on regulation of communications (NCRC). The contract providing internet service, including physical body has to be made in a written form and to fix the provisioned numbered resource and so on. That bill was rejected by the Parliament on the 20th of September 2016, as an alternative bill 3549-2 was rejected too, which was to withdraw out of regulation sphere “formations of routing, IP traffic within defined system, functioning of points of traffic exchange within the world information system regulated by the documents (rules, standards, recommendations and others)established by international organizations. An alternative project of law 3549-1 that was regulating drastically enough the functioning of operators and ISPs, interaction with users and so on has been sent to another first reading.
As from that, another two alternative projects of law have been lodged to the parliament: 3549-3 and 3549-4. The bill 3549-3 is in fact the bill 3549 which had been rejected previously in 2016, but now it included some new elements taken from the bill 3549-2. The project of law 3549-4 filed by another groups of MPs is to set up severe rules and restrictions and has some certain specificities, for instance, as to virtual network operators.
One ought to understand all of three projects of law 3549-1, 3549-3 and 3549-4 are aimed to institute state regulation of ISPs, including mobile communication operators who provide with access to the internet and state regulation of the procedure of connection to internet network of physical and juridical persons. All these projects of law stipulate concluding of agreement between final user and ISP not only during stationary connection, but during use of mobile internet and so on. The new legislation is to diminish anonymity of final users in internet and to allow the state to identify them.
Such projects of law have been lodged for rating ballot on the 17th of January 2019 (rating ballot is to foresee the results of vote of an issue on the agenda. Only 170 MPs voted for these texts of law, what mean these projects of law are not to be included to the agenda immediately. It is curious to notice, the MPs from Petro Poroshenko’s Block (BPP) and “Popular Front” (Narodny Front) backed the projects of law. One could suppose so the issue is to be examined once more.
By Ali Safarov, IMI lawyer
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