Russia Raises Heat on Twitter, Google and Facebook in Online Crackdown (nytimes.com) 36
Russia is increasingly pressuring Google, Twitter and Facebook to fall in line with Kremlin internet crackdown orders or risk restrictions inside the country, as more governments around the world challenge the companies' principles on online freedom. From a report: Russia's internet regulator, Roskomnadzor, recently ramped up its demands for the Silicon Valley companies to remove online content that it deems illegal or restore pro-Kremlin material that had been blocked. The warnings have come at least weekly since services from Facebook, Twitter and Google were used as tools for anti-Kremlin protests in January. If the companies do not comply, the regulator has said, they face fines or access to their products may be throttled.
The latest clashes flared up this week, when Roskomnadzor told Google on Monday to block thousands of unspecified pieces of illegal content or it would slow access to the company's services. On Tuesday, a Russian court fined Google 6 million rubles, or about $81,000, for not taking down another piece of content. On Wednesday, the government ordered Facebook and Twitter to store all data on Russian users within the country by July 1 or face fines. In March, the authorities had made it harder for people to see and send posts on Twitter after the company did not take down content that the government considered illegal. Twitter has since removed roughly 6,000 posts to comply with the orders, according to Roskomnadzor. The regulator has threatened similar penalties against Facebook.
The latest clashes flared up this week, when Roskomnadzor told Google on Monday to block thousands of unspecified pieces of illegal content or it would slow access to the company's services. On Tuesday, a Russian court fined Google 6 million rubles, or about $81,000, for not taking down another piece of content. On Wednesday, the government ordered Facebook and Twitter to store all data on Russian users within the country by July 1 or face fines. In March, the authorities had made it harder for people to see and send posts on Twitter after the company did not take down content that the government considered illegal. Twitter has since removed roughly 6,000 posts to comply with the orders, according to Roskomnadzor. The regulator has threatened similar penalties against Facebook.
Good (Score:3, Funny)
Re: (Score:2, Funny)
With blackjack and hookers?
I was told there'd be blackjack and hookers.
Re: Good (Score:2)
That's true. I know you meant it as a joke, but it's really not. I'm surprised that there's not more effort to circumvent so-called national firewalls.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Their laws are very clear: paedofile, drug abuse and manufacture and assisted suicide/suicide pact content must be removed in 24h. That is a rather lax requirement compared to Germany and France which are now aiming at 1h response.
Google will be leaving Russia anyway and it will be not be because of take-down requests. It will be because of reinstatement requests. It lost a court case for reinstatement of Tsar
The first but not the last... (Score:2)
Russia (and any nation) can do this if a company does business inside their country.
It's essentially impossible to comply with the requirements of every country on earth.
So the dream of a global business on the internet has taken a big hit here.
Re:The first but not the last... (Score:4, Insightful)
There is a long standing model for global business - the in-country franchise. There are long standing mechanisms for dealing with investor disputes - international arbitrage, etc.
They break only if the are conflicting laws and conflicting regulations.That happens every time you have USA involved, because it insists that its law is global and applies equally in rural China, rural Texas and the Mariana Trench. Further to this, the current reading of the 14th amendment as applied by USA courts is that international law can go suck a tail pipe and USA law has premacy over it anywhere it likes to apply it. That was a problem 100 years ago, but nobody gave a f*ck, because USA did not know what two villagers in let's say Upper Yakutia or Vanuatu were trading in. That is not the case in the days of the Internet and Internet companies HQed in USA. It knows and insists it has authority over it. The Microsoft vs DOJ Irish servers case was a fine example of this. [theverge.com]
This is what makes it impossible to run a global business.
Re: (Score:2)
It's essentially impossible to comply with the requirements of every country on earth.
If you're making millions of dollars from a country, then you can afford to hire a few developers to ensure you are following regulations for that country.
Re: (Score:1)
"you can afford to hire a few developers"
That's just crazy talk.
More like, you need to hire a top legal firm in each country. And if it doesn't cover every branch of the law in that country, you'll need a few legal firms. Plus you are going to need a larger staff of permanent lawyers. The last place I worked for had 1 lawyer for every billion dollars a year it made. They took up an entire floor. They were always fully occupied. And then on top of that it hired legal councils in the countries it was
Re: (Score:2)
True point, you need to hire lawyers. For $10million a year, you can hire a good team of lawyers.
Re: (Score:1)
I think at $300-$325 *per* billable hour, you are going to run thru $10 million in no time.
And all this assumes the country isn't just being malicious to your corporation because it wants a bribe, or you are based in a national rival, or the country is protecting a native industry in the same field.
The above billable rate would only cover 14 lawyers who specialized in international law and commercial sales. There are over a hundred countries.
My basic point was, the internet bypassed *many* national and int
What I would do as one of those companies (Score:4, Interesting)
I'd basically disable the service myself in that country, and just have a single landing page that describes the situation about attempted government censorship, with contact information to the relevant government department for people to contact if they're unhappy about the situation.
Then I'd sit back and enjoy my popcorn.
Re: What I would do as one of those companies (Score:2)
I like the explanation, but fundamentally you don't have to stop offering the service -- you just have to avoid having assets or staff in the country and you have to accept that someone who owes you money in the country (like a customer or someone who wants to pay you for ad space) may not be able to get it to you.
Facebook could just say 'fuck you' and take a fairly small loss and effectively force them to go to the effort of blocking you and keeping you blocked.
Re: (Score:2)
I like the explanation, but fundamentally you don't have to stop offering the service
Right, you wouldn't need to, but in this example I'd do it preemptively before the government 'throttles' my services, which would lead to users complaining to me rather than to the real source of the problem.
But in general, yes, all these fines are basically pocket change to them right now, and the real "threat" is really only to those employed by these companies that actually work within the country's borders.
Re: What I would do as one of those companies (Score:2)
I wasn't suggesting paying the fine. I was suggesting operating entirely outside the borders of the particular country. Let it be their problem to block you, but we're in agreement that it's important to not leave assets or people behind where they can be used as leverage. The problem is you can't get income from there anymore unless it's paid through some other country to circumvent the law.
Re: (Score:1)
Ah... I came to the comment section only for this usual, moronic answer.
You see, what do you know about russian Internet? You think the country will be in panic and shout at Putin to calm down if Facebook shuts down its service?
You obviously don't know about VK [wikipedia.org]. It has about 500 million accounts and is the most popular website in Russia. Facebook has abour 60 mio. users in Russia.
It's mother company, mail.ru is basically the gmail of Russia.
So yeah, let them stop service in Russia. The only thing that'll ac
Re: All countries need to do this, not just Russia (Score:2)
Sort of like how China would classify any talk of COVID having possibly leaked from the Wuhan lab as "conspiracy theories."
Roskomnadzor (Score:2)
What principles? (Score:1, Troll)
Twitter will ban your account for "anti-trans harassment" if you refer to trans people with the biologically appropriate pronouns. Facebook and YouTube won't even allow certified doctors and epidemiologists post videos questioning various aspects of the current narrative around COVID-19.
This is not complicated, there is no need for "nuance" here. Big tech has firmly come down on the side that the marketplace of ideas
Re: (Score:2)
Big tech has only one real bias: whatever maximizes profits.
Technology and media specialization wraps people in eyeball-trapping blankets of confirmation bias, so people with anti-trans, racist, or anti-science views are blissfully unaware how unpopular those views are. Even though trans people are one of the most widely reviled groups in the US, "wide" is relative -- polls show that fewer than 1/3 of public views the group negatively, and if you look at the most economically valuable media consumers (youn
Re:What principles? (Score:5, Interesting)
which sounds perfectly reasonable until you realize that nation-states run entire propaganda operations dedicated to the intentional spread of actual disinformation
allowing Russia to spread vaccine disinformation is dangerous or deadly, and they have a track record of doing that
they also have a track record of injecting (and upvoting) extremely biased information into public forums
Yahoo had to shut down their message boards because Putin ordered Prigozhin to create biased boards on Yahoo. As a result, 100% of Yahoo articles that had any topic of a remotely political nature wound up with comments that were either 100% extreme, angry right-wing (for pages and pages and pages) or 100% extreme, angry left-wing (for pages and pages and pages). Meaning - none of the comments were authentic, or if they were authentic, they were inauthentically voted up or down to create an inauthentic result set.
Beyond intentional disinformation you have mountains of spam. That's another form of inauthentic behavior. That's not "free speech" - it's intentional abuse like screaming "fire" in a crowded theater without a fire.
Re: (Score:2)
This is the same complaint my anti-vaxxer niece used to have about "our science" being suppressed.
Science has plenty crackpots -- biologists who believe in creationism for example, or geologists who believe the Noah's ark story is literal truth. They still get to be scientists and publish in real journals, but they face Sagan's extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence burden in any scientific forum. On social medial you get the crackpottery completely unfiltered.
Medicine is even worse. Every q