The State Duma has finally adopted a law on pre-installations of Russian software on smartphones
In the third final reading, the State Duma adopted the law on presets. According to him, Russian software must be pre-installed on smart devices sold in Russia.
The adoption of the law took place today, November 21. It will come into force on July 1, 2020, if approved by the Federation Council and signed by the President of the country.
Currently, neither a specific list of devices or their types is known, nor a list of programs that manufacturers or stores will need to install. They will be determined later by the Government. However, already now the State Duma website says that it is primarily about smartphones, computers and “smart” TVs.
The law was introduced by an initiative group led by LDPR deputy Sergey Zhigarev in June 2019. Formally, it is aimed at protecting consumer rights, designed to give Russian users the opportunity to use gadgets with suitable software out of the box, without installing anything themselves.
However, as a representative of the Semenov & Pevzner law firm explained to us earlier in a comment, “there is no objective evidence that the Russian consumer somehow suffers from the absence of “Russian programs” pre-installed on devices in certain cases.
According to RBC, the Association of Trading Companies and Manufacturers of Electrical and Computer Equipment (RATEC, members — Apple, Samsung, Huawei, Google, Philips, etc.) in January opposed a similar initiative that was previously put forward by the Federal Antimonopoly Service. The latter offered to pre-install applications in categories: “search”, “messenger”, “maps” and “antivirus”. The initiative was then supported by software manufacturers and mobile operators. Including Mail.Ru Group, Kaspersky Lab, MTS, MegaFon, as well as the Russoft association.
After the current bill began to be discussed in the Duma, manufacturers and sellers of electronics sent a letter to the chairman of the State Duma Vyacheslav Volodin. In it, they insisted on hearings on this issue and asked to involve the professional community in the discussion. They were especially concerned about the question of who would be obligated to pre-install the software. The letter remained unanswered.
The question was also raised whether the law would lead to the departure of Apple from Russia, which does not pre-install local content on its devices. Anton Gorelkin, a member of the State Duma Committee on Information Policy, Information Technologies and Communications, assured TASS that this would not happen: “Apple will not go anywhere and will continue to work in the market, I am deeply convinced of this.”
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