Starting March 1, 2020, Russia has cancelled fee for accessing a whole range of websites.
The decision came as a result of the Accessible Internet project. There will be no fee for traffic spent to access certain online resources.
The decision was made back on January 21 and the rule took effect on March 1, 2020, according to the Russian Ministry of Digital Development, Communications and Mass Media.
Free access is now provided to socially significant websites, including the Gosuslugi public services website and websites of federal and regional authorities.
The new measure will be particularly beneficial for mobile internet users who often sign up to packages with limited internet traffic. According to the ministry, in 2018 alone some 1.6 mio Russians accessed Gosuslugi every day.
The idea of making socially significant websites accessible to everybody comes from President Vladimir Putin’s latest Address to the Federal Assembly.
In the future, users will have free access not only to government websites. For example, taxi aggregator is another category of websites under consideration. Citing Communications Minister Maksut Shadayev, Interfax reports that the full list of socially significant websites that internet providers will not charge for will be released within the next month. The minister added that all these websites had been selected from those highly in demand.
So far, there is no information about any compensation to internet companies for free access to these selected online resources. Experts estimate that communications operators and internet providers will spend more than RUR 150 bln ($2.2 mio) on this project annually.