UAE President Sheikh Khalifa bin Zayed Al Nahyan signed a new law last week that makes it illegal to mask your IP address when going online, Emirates24/7 reports.

Federal Law No. 12/2016, amending Federal Law No. 5/2012, is a new UAE law for combating IT crimes in the United Arab Emirates, which features the following controversial paragraph:

“ Whoever uses a fraudulent computer network protocol address (IP address) by using a false address or a third-party address by any other means for the purpose of committing a crime or preventing its discovery, shall be punished by temporary imprisonment and a fine of no less than Dh500,000 and not exceeding Dh2,000,000, or either of these two penalties. ”

Reasons for approving the law are murky

The purpose of this law is to deter UAE citizens from accessing the Internet by masking their real IP address, which is like a street address for the Internet, revealing someone's rough position on the globe.

The reasons for deterring UAE citizens from masking their IP address are many. First off, to fight cyber-crime, but some argue that this rule was put in place to scare users from using VPNs or proxies and accessing services blocked in the country, such as Internet telephony (VoIP) services.

VoIP is banned in the UAE, and only two ISPs, Du and Etisalat, can provide these services, which, of course, block access to VoIP Web and mobile services such as Facebook Messenger, Snapchat, Skype, and others.

Users caught using a VPN, Tor or proxy to access a VoIP provider are technically breaking the law, and subjected to the above law.

Other countries like Morocco also allow telcos to ban Internet calling services to protect their businesses. At one point, even Russia was pondering similar laws to protect Russian telecom giants from Skype and ICQ, the most successful VoIP services at that time.