OREANDA-NEWS. February 13, 2013. The Federal Antimonopoly Service (FAS Russia) terminated a case against the “Big Three” providers: “MegaPhon” OJSC, “VympelCom” OJSC and “MTS” OJSC on violating the antimonopoly law in the course of providing access to informational-and-reference and entertainment services of the third persons (content-providers) to subscribers of a network of mobile telephone communications, reported the press-centre of FAS Russia.

Providers were warned about the need to offer additional informational-and-reference and entertainment services, rendered independently as well as by engaging the third persons, only upon a subscriber’s consent in the form of active actions, unambiguously showing a subscriber’s intention to obtain an additional service, and do not independently connect to additional services in an automatic mode, particularly for free with further tariffication after the expiry of a particular period.

The FAS Commission examined how “VympelCom” OJSC and “MTS” OJSC executed the warning to stop actions (omissions) that have signs of violating the antimonopoly law.

FAS has established that providers have devised and published on their official web-sites the procedures (conditions) for rendering additional informational-and-reference and entertainment services, including, in particular, the methods for commissioning such services, the procedures and methods for rejecting them as well as the procedures for lodging claims.

Providers shall consider all complaints, claims and disputes related to rendering additional informational-reference and entertainment services.

FAS also established that in order to control consent of the subscribers of “MegaPhon” OJSC, “VympelCom” OJSC and “MTS” OJSC under the framework of “subscription” service for additional informational-and-reference and entertainment services ordered by WEB/WAP-enquiry the so-called lending pages shall be used.

Having investigated the case, FAS terminated the case against “MegaPhon” OJSC due to absence of signs of violating the antimonopoly law and against “VympelCom” OJSC and “MTS” OJSC – due to executing the FAS determination.

The procedures for obtaining and refusing additional informational-and-reference and entertainment services:

1. Browsing web-sites with information about possibilities to obtain services “by subscription”, a subscriber finds a service of interest and selects the content which is of interest to him.

2. To obtain access to the service of a content-provider a subscriber is redirected to the provider’s landing page, where the subscriber inputs its phone number and initiates sending an SMS-message with the code for service fulfillment.

3. A subscriber receives an SMS with the code on one’s cell phone and inputs it in the relevant field on the landing page and activates subscription. A subscriber is reminded that by entering the code the fee-based subscription shall be activated and he is informed about the service costs. If a subscriber does not respond to the SMS that contains the code and does not enter the code in the relevant field on the landing page, the subscription shall not be activated.

4. A subscriber receives an SMS-notice about activating services “by subscription” indicating the costs of the service and the procedures for deactivating the service.

The FAS Commission also has established that “MegaPhon” OJSC, “VympelCom” OJSC and “MTS” OJSC offer a free service for restricting access to additional informational-and reference and entertainment services (“Stop-Content”, (“Stop-Content (black-and-white lists)”).

In addition to the above measures, by 1st April 2013 “MTS” OJSC will apply several technical solutions to additional services rendered to subscribers on a regular basis (by subscription) ordered by an SMS/USSD-enquiry in order to additionally control whether subscribers agreed to receive these services.

For the subscriptions activated by SMS, it will be possible to connect to an additional service by sending an SMS-enquiry with an additional short SMS-code of subscription from the subscriber’s number to a unified short number 7887, registered for “My Subscriptions” platform.

For the subscriptions activated by USSD, there will be a unified USSD-interface for connecting an additional service with short codes corresponding to each subscription registered at a portal, in particular informing a subscriber about the connected service and its costs. To subscribe, it will be necessary to open the USSD-interface of the “My Subscriptions” platform, choose subscriptions of interest from the catalogue of content-provider’s subscriptions and subscribe.