Russian Regulators Block Google Online Advertising Acquisition 120
An anonymous reader writes "Russian regulators will not let Google buy a local online advertising company, halting a $140 million deal agreed to in July. Google had planned to acquire Zao Begun, which has a search and contextual video and text advertising business. Begun is owned by Rambler Media, a Russian company that own various Web sites and runs a search engine. Google said it is reviewing the decision of Russia's Federal Antimonopoly Service (FAS) and hasn't decided how to react. Slashdot has previously covered some of the issues surrounding Google's muscle in the advertising market."
Controlled propaganda (Score:2, Interesting)
I imagine that Sergey Brin has already invested quite a bit of money into the Russian economy. Although if you control the advertising you control the propaganda.
Russia will break you (Score:1, Interesting)
Russia is slowly falling back into what they feel comfortable with and what they know. They are cracking down on visa's and have reduced the amount of American's allowed into the country. Sure enough they will be back to their old communist ways. This is what the people know and I think they like it that way. Democracy for people that are not used to thinking for themselves is hard.
Re:Google made a major mistake (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Controlled propaganda (Score:2, Interesting)
Noone is ignoring the fact that google is doing evil by our standards, and that censorship is bad. Yes we all get that.
But currently, its chinas country and their rules. Its far better that google is in the country, providing searches and telling the population that these searches are being censored than not, both from a business and ethical point of view.
Google staying out of china couldnt change something, and they arent doing evil by the standards of china, you cant just put the entire world under your idealised sense of morality, its not your world and you dont get to define the rules.
Now im not turning a blind eye to what china does and im not saying that by our standards its not bad (mmmmmkay), im just saying that its how things are done in China and google staying out of china would not have changed diddly squat about how the chinese government does anything. It does however provide chinese people with more information than they had previously.