The proposal is being weighed as part of a bill to overhaul the telecommunications industry, drafting of which began in the spring, according to Forbes, which cited three sources, including people in the Digital Development Ministry and the IT sector.
Under the plan, all traffic from foreign domains would pass through technical means of countering threats (TSPU), equipment that the communications regulator Roskomnadzor installs on operators' networks. The regulator uses it to filter traffic, block resources and slow down individual services.
The size of the limit has yet to be set, Forbes reported, and the ministry is expected to be given the right to restrict foreign traffic above the quota. The ministry said the issues are being worked out but called conclusions about the content of the final amendments premature. The stated aim of the changes is to make the telecom market more transparent and focused on users' interests, and communications services safe.
Experts interviewed by Forbes pointed to technological difficulties. Leonid Konik, a partner at ComNews Research, said separating foreign traffic from Russian traffic in real time is extremely difficult, since data routing often passes through other countries. Introducing a limit on international traffic would disrupt the connectivity of the network, he said.
A technical expert at RKS Global added that a Russian site on foreign hosting would fall into the foreign category, while a server rented in Russia would count as domestic. A significant share of Russians' foreign traffic consists of tools for circumventing blocks, as well as Android and iOS updates, app stores, Telegram and games, the expert said. According to him, the TSPU itself cannot limit the traffic of a specific subscriber, so operators will have to transmit information about users' activity to Roskomnadzor in real time.
Stanislav Seleznev, a digital security expert at the Network Freedoms project, noted that legislation does not set a limit on the volume of legal traffic for a subscriber, but quotas can be set by agreement with a provider. The mechanism for centralized management of the network set out in the law on the "sovereign Runet," he said, allows any technical measures to be introduced for control.
In March, the head of the Digital Development Ministry discussed with operators a surcharge for consuming more than 15 Gb of international mobile traffic per month, Novaya Gazeta Europe reported. The idea was later postponed until the September State Duma elections. The draft federal budget shows that almost 60 billion rubles is to be allocated to traffic filtering and blocking in 2027-2029.