While the mobile operators in Germany, instant messaging and VoIP more and more as an opportunity to exercise, see the telecom service provider in Russia is a serious danger for the local economy and national security. The lobby of the association “Russian Union of Industrialists and Entrepreneurs (RSPP), which among other things, several companies in the telecommunications industry are, therefore calls for a law against foreign providers such as Skype or ICQ.

At first, the prohibition to security concerns justified. The foreign companies use their own protocols, the domestic intelligence can not be intercepted. In particular, the leading provider Skype is absolutely secure Voip calls like an argument for its eponymous software. Moreover, according to the lobbyists, the foreign companies to the Russian market break. The RSSP argues that in Russia, according to estimates by market researchers in three years, 40 percent of all calls via VoIP services will be settled. But not on their own, because there is not.

The real reasons for the exclusion of foreign companies from Russia, however, are economic interests. The vice-president of the TTK, the telecom division of the state-owned rail company, Vitaly Kotov, warned in a statement on the website of the RSPP before “uncontrollably falling profits for the local telecom provider.” Even Valery Ermakov, senior manager of the third largest mobile phone company MegaFon speaks of the struggle against VoIP order to protect investments. In other words, the low-cost competition from providers of Internet telephone calls to prevent high income by over-phone minutes.