A bill that would enforce this is making its way through the Parliament

Jul 2, 2014 12:30 GMT  ·  By

A massive wave of blocked sites is on its way in Russia, as the government is moving one step closer to banning all online services that don’t store content within its borders.

This isn’t exactly a surprise considering that there have already been warnings about Russia taking steps in this particular direction, especially following the NSA revelations, which they use as an excuse to copy off China’s book of rules.

The first bill requiring that personal data of Russians be stored inside the country passed the Russian State Duma yesterday. If it manages to get all the stamps of approval, all non-Russian companies will be forced to find a way to store local data in the country.

This means that Facebook, Google, Yahoo and any other service, including apps, that doesn’t come from Mother Russia, but is used by locals, will need to put physical servers inside the country.

What’s more, all these companies wouldn’t even be allowed to send data outside the country unless they can guarantee for the data stored in Russia. The bill states that when personal data is collected, the operator is required to provide a guarantee that the collection, storage, updating and retrieval of personal data on citizens of the Russian Federation is held in data centers on the territory.

Unless companies comply, access to these services will be restricted. The new law is said to take effect in September 2016 if it passes all political hurdles, which means that all these companies would have plenty of time to build data centers within the country.

The changes would not only represent a big inconvenience to tech companies around the world, but there would also be huge costs.

While this isn’t the first time the idea of storing a country’s data locally has been thrown around, it has, in the past, been deemed unrealistic because of the huge costs of implementing it.

Most of these conversations have surged since the NSA scandal broke out last year and Edward Snowden shared tons of top-secret documents with the media. Most importantly, they took place as the world discussed about the intelligence agency spying on everyone in any country around the world.

Russians peg national security as one of the reasons for desiring to close off Internet access to some of the biggest companies in the world unless they comply with the new rules, but in recent months, the country’s government has given signs of moving more towards controlling Internet access as a whole rather than just to foreign sites.