Sig Nordal

In today’s segment of the rollercoaster ride that is Russian technology legislation, lawmakers proposed – then hastily postponed – a plan that would have made it difficult to legally call landlines or mobile phones in the country from Skype.

First, per the business journal Vedomosti, a group of legislators proposed amendments to Russian communications legislation that would require a caller’s operator to transmit unaltered information about the caller’s number. Operators who did not abide by this rule would be denied a license. The bill had been due to go for a first reading in the Duma (the Russian parliament) on Wednesday.

When someone calls a regular phone number in Russia using SkypeOut, the call recipient generally sees the incoming call as coming from a local number – they can’t call it back, but it looks like a normal phone number. I’m in Germany and calls from Skype show up on my phones…