Roskomnadzor revoked 1,967 licenses from telecom operators for reporting failures

Nearly two thousand licenses for the provision of communications services were terminated following an inspection by Roskomnadzor. The agency applied Subparagraph 5 of Paragraph 1 of Article 39 of the law "On Communications," which allows permits to be revoked in the event of violations of established requirements, the RKN press service reported.

The reason was a systemic failure in reporting. Operators either did not submit the mandatory information about their activities at all, or provided incomplete and unreliable data. The expected anti-leader in the number of revocations was the capital region: in Moscow and the Moscow Region, 286 licenses belonging to 42 companies were canceled.

Next come St. Petersburg and the Leningrad Region (42 licenses from 15 operators) and Krasnodar Krai (33 licenses from 11 operators).

Among legal entities, the record holders were "Bridzh Telekom," "Ozon Telekom," "Informatsionnyi Tsentr," and six more entities — each had seven permits revoked.

The mass purge of the register is taking place amid impending tighter rules for issuing licenses. The Ministry of Digital Development is discussing the introduction of three categories of permits costing from 1 million to 50 million rubles, as well as a ban on individual entrepreneurs obtaining them. Beneficiaries of companies stripped of a license for a repeated gross violation may be barred from the communications market for 10 years. In effect, the state is pushing nominal firms out of the telecom market — firms that existed only on paper and did not invest a single kopek in infrastructure.