14 DAY TRIAL // Microsoft is already under scrutiny in China as part of an anti-trust investigation that started last year, and the company is about to be inspected by the Russian authorities too in order to determine how the company complies with local legislation.
A report published by TASS reveals that Russian regulators have already scheduled more than 1,000 inspections at various foreign companies that are selling services in the country, and Microsoft is one of them.
A law that was adopted in September 2015 requires all foreign companies to store Russian users' data on local servers, and the investigators are specifically looking to find out whether these firms are complying with the regulation or not.
Microsoft opposed to the law
Interestingly, Microsoft is one of the companies that opposed the law and even threatened to leave the Russian market should the regulation pass. Eventually, this law regarding personal data became effective on September 1, 2015, but Microsoft, Google, and others, all of which had criticized the push for such legislation, continued doing business in Russia, so they now have to comply with it.
Russian President Vladimir Putin is believed to be the one who requested the law, as he criticized US-based tech companies for collecting user details in the country and handing them over to American agencies.
“The Internet began initially when the Internet first appeared as a special CIA project and is still being developed that way. The rest is what has made it to the market and has developed to huge proportions. Nevertheless, it is initially a military program, a special program, and special services are still at the centre of things,” Putin said earlier the same year.
Investigations to determine if foreign companies comply with the new law started in late 2015, and so far, no violations have been found, so the chances are that Microsoft isn’t infringing it either.