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Moscow Tells 13 Mostly US Tech Firms They Must Set Up in Russia by 2022 (reuters.com) 147

Posted by msmash from the closer-look dept.
Russia has demanded that 13 foreign and mostly U.S. technology companies be officially represented on Russian soil by the end of 2021 or face possible restrictions or outright bans. From a report: The demand, from state communications regulator Roskomnadzor late on Monday, gave few details of what exactly the companies were required to do and targeted some firms that already have Russian offices. Foreign social media giants with more than 500,000 daily usershave been obliged to open offices in Russia since a new law took effect on July 1. The list published on Monday names the companies for the first time.

It lists Alphabet's Google, Facebook, Twitter, TikTok and messaging app Telegram, all of which Russia has fined this year for failing to delete content it deems illegal. Apple, which Russia has targeted for alleged abuse of its dominant position in the mobile applications market, was also on the list. None of those companies responded to requests for comment. Roskomnadzor said firms that violate the legislation could face advertising, data collection and money transfer restrictions, or outright bans.
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Moscow Tells 13 Mostly US Tech Firms They Must Set Up in Russia by 2022 More

Moscow Tells 13 Mostly US Tech Firms They Must Set Up in Russia by 2022

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  • Show us that the Internet still recognizes censorship as damage and routes around it.

    • No it does not. It nowadays recognizes MONEY.

      Twitter tried that in Eu. Many years ago. And nicely landed in Ireland only several months later. It has been nicely compliant ever since. Google, Facebook, etc did not even try.

      The situation is very simple - they either comply or the system set-up to halt payments to ISSI, Al Qaeda and affiliates is deployed to halt any payments for ads. Then they comply. And pay. With interest. This is how the Internet works today. It is driven not by free speech, but by fr

    • Re:Do the right thing, FAANGs! (Score:4, Interesting)

      by 93 Escort Wagon ( 326346 ) on Tuesday November 23, 2021 @04:16PM (#62014389)

      Show us that the Internet still recognizes censorship as damage and routes around it.

      With modern nation-state censorship, the problem is - while "routing around" it does happen for the people outside of that nation-state, it doesn't necessarily help the citizens of that state get access to the internet of the outside world.

      China has shown that it's possible for even a large country to control pretty much all the points of network ingress.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Entrope ( 68843 )

        No, China has shown that it's possible for a strongly authoritarian country to control pretty much all the points of network ingress. That is not exactly news. In most Western countries, that level of network control would cause a popular uprising.

        Unless Facebook, Google and Twitter were the ones imposing it, of course.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by hey! ( 33014 )

      Show us that the Internet still recognizes censorship as damage and routes around it.

      The smart way to defeat the Internet's routing around censorship is self-censorship, which you can get with what in the end turned out to be the Internet's killer app: *surveillance*.

    • Show us that the Internet still recognizes censorship as damage and routes around it.

      The censorship hasn't happened yet. Right now it is merely the threat of censorship.

      If they carry through on their threats, that's when it will be recognized as damage. Just like in some regions vandalism of 8.8.8.8 and similar became common after censorship, and VPN is widely available, the adoption will spread after rather than before, because before the restriction there is no need for it. If they actually block access (which is their right) then the public response and rerouting will be the repairs (wh

  • This is hostage taking (Score:5, Insightful)

    by WillAffleckUW ( 858324 ) on Tuesday November 23, 2021 @02:53PM (#62014067) Homepage Journal

    Putin wants his kickbacks and bodies for his prisons.

    Look, the economy of Russia is less than most large US states. Just tell him to take a flying leap.

    • Re:This is hostage taking (Score:5, Interesting)

      by The Faywood Assassin ( 542375 ) <benyjr AT yahoo DOT ca> on Tuesday November 23, 2021 @03:04PM (#62014125) Homepage

      I was thinking the same thing.

      Russia is no China. At least China has serious leverage.

      Russia is a coffee stain on an accounting report.

      • More like a coffee ring on the last blank page in a long report, actually.

      • Googling around, Russia's GDP is about 10% of China's.

        • Re: (Score:3)

          by hey! ( 33014 )

          Xi Jinping took office in 2012, and foreign investment has generally declined since [macrotrends.net]. When foreign investors got a good look at the man, what they saw made them gun shy. After the past two years investors are going to be even more cautious. Even native businesses that don't adequately bend the knee are severely punished [fortune.com].

          The regulatory situation in China has always been bad; it has harsh rules and punishments without the rule of law. Things work because authorities turn a blind eye to infringements by favor

          • Russia's leadership has rabies for several hundred years already. Yeltsin was almost sane, so were a few of the tsars, but the whole rest were/are authoritative mass murderers whose whims constantly change, and harsh punishments that ignore any laws are the norm.

      • Russia is a coffee stain on an accounting report.

        144 million products to show advertising partners is hardly a coffee stain.

    • > bodies for his prisons

      Spot on. He wants people to arrest for leverage. Only a fool would comply.

    • Corporations don't do that. It may not be a huge chunk of money, but they'd sell their grandmothers for pocket change.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Tom ( 822 )

      Is it though?

      When you look at how the big tech giants are using globalism to dodge taxes and legal responsibilities, I can understand any country saying that they'd prefer to have at least some leverage over them.

      Several non-russian countries have debated similar ideas in the past, though with various encouragements and regulations instead of flat out telling them.

    • Look, the economy of Russia is less than most large US states.

      Tech companies don't give a shit about economy. What Russia has is 144million potential products to show off to their shareholders and advertising "partners".

  • What sort of presence? (Score:3)

    by Midnight Thunder ( 17205 ) on Tuesday November 23, 2021 @02:53PM (#62014069) Homepage Journal

    What sort of presence would they require? Just one that can be legally pursued?

    I also wonder at what point it just makes sense to geoblock a country and be done with it?

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by LKM ( 227954 )

      What sort of presence would they require? Just one that can be legally pursued?

      Hilariously, the law doesn't specify that. For now, it appears Russia mostly wants these companies to be accountable to the Russian laws, and presumably, having an office in Russia makes that easier. In the past, Roskomnadzor has had run-ins with Twitter when they didn't delete data they were told to delete, for example. But my guess is that the long-term goal is to tax these companies, access their data, and have the ability to

      • For some hard data to back this up, they are already leveraging fines against the tech companies for not complying with their takedown requests. A larger physical presence would make it harder for them to dodge fines, and make the ceiling on how big the fines can be higher, since they have more assets in Russian territory. The specs of how big the presence needs to be are TBD, but the gist of the announcement is clearly, "bigger".

        India's government has recently threatened (and maybe actually did?) to jail e

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Luckyo ( 1726890 )

          You don't need to go that far. EU already has all those demands and more in place in various adopted directives and regulations.

    • What sort of presence would they require? Just one that can be legally pursued?

      I assume it's one that can be fined and/or told what to do instead of one that can only be blocked at the border.

    • A server encased in lucite, that dumps acid into the hard drive cage when you try to crack it open.

    • It does seem like the sort of thing that would end up being a subsidiary without the access to financials or databases necessary to actually do anything that would promptly declare bankruptcy whenever a judgement was granted.

    • I also wonder at what point it just makes sense to geoblock a country and be done with it?

      Ultimately it depends on the population. 144million isn't a small number of potential advertising sales.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by sfcat ( 872532 )
        All people are not equal on balance sheets. If a population has no money to buy stuff, it is worthless in such a calculation. Most Russians who don't know Putin personally fall into this category. Or to put it another way, who would pay money to advertise to Russians?

        • All people are not equal on balance sheets.

          That's why they aren't shown individually on balance sheets, but rather as an aggregate number 144million times larger. The advertisers don't get a complete dossier of marketing, and neither do shareholders. There's no breakdown here which would make the 144million any less valuable than those living in California.

          Again tech companies don't sell things to you. They don't care how much you own and their measure of your worth is quite different to anyone else's.

          who would pay money to advertise to Russians

          Anyone who doesn't specify the location for the

    • I'd guess the demands run to locally based datacenters that must be used to store Russian users' data, perhaps combined with the use of weakened cryptography or accessible keystores for that data.

      Even without the weakened crypto, they can probably leverage "locally based data centers" into a ton of intelligence attacks on the data communications going in and out, co-opting local employees to do favors for the intelligence services, and so on.

      Even if you don't buy that part, I'm sure they hate the fact that

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by sfcat ( 872532 )

        At least China has the promise of an upward economic trajectory

        That was before they stopped buying Australian coal. Now they can't keep the lights on. Ignore the environmental problems with coal here, if you can't power the factories, China's economy can't grow (or even stay the same size). Also, you seem to be unaware of the Chinese demographic problems. They have a group from 45 to 65 years old that is 800 million people strong. Unfortunately, the group from 25 to 45 is only 400 million and the group from 5 to 2 is 200 million. See the problem? Also, if you ar

  • More than 500,000 daily usershave (Score:3)

    by bustinbrains ( 6800166 ) on Tuesday November 23, 2021 @03:05PM (#62014127)

    Russia just wants beards. Lots of beards. And vodka.

  • Rent a room somewhere and contract someone to stick a sign on it. Good luck getting any human being to man it. Nothing pays well enough to be the person Putin has arrested when the home office still tells Russia to f*ck right off.

  • I wonder how many companies will hire people whose jobs exist mainly so that they can be taken hostage when an authoritarian regime wants to exert control for antidemocratic reasons.

  • This is so stupid (Score:3)

    by slashdot_commentator ( 444053 ) on Tuesday November 23, 2021 @03:44PM (#62014269) Journal

    Just pull out of Russia. The market there is minuscule.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by niks42 ( 768188 )
      But this is exactly what companies like IBM did in the 60s and 70s to earn a right to sell into government contracts around the world. UK? Build two manufacturing plants and a lab, we will take you seriously. Semiconductor manufacturing in Essonnes in France, along with Montpelier; plants in Sindelfingen in Germany and Vimercate in Italy. It was part of the cost of doing business - invest in our country, and we will consider your for our driver licencing agencies and tax offices, our military and security s
      • It's somewhat similar(and they might well do it regardless, certainly more than a few outfits gambling that they can make enough money in China for it to be worth it before their mandatory-joint-venture partner gets tapped to replace them); but there is one potentially significant difference:

        The classic "let's see some local investment if you want us to even think of you as an option for public procurement contracts" arrangement has an indirect effect on the rest of the company's operations(in the sense

    • The market there is minuscule.

      Market for whom and what? Tech companies don't make money by selling you things. They make money by selling you to others. There's 144million potential products in Russia.

    • Just pull out of Russia.

      But that's the thing: They don't even have to do that. The companies don't need to block Russians, restrict Russians, or prohibit Russian users at this point.

      It's the Russian citizens that are subject to Russian law.

      Russia can attempt to regulate their citizens, and they have been attempting it for years. Executives at the other companies can avoid travel to Russia or countries friendly to them, which they likely already do.

      If the penalties get bad enough to actually trigger international law --- and th

      • simply posting something like "it appears your are from Russia, and your nation does not allow you to access this content" is generally sufficient

        Except that Russia demands deleting content Putin doesn't like completely, not merely hiding it from certain users.

  • There are already different classes of industry that are regulated by the government, in the sense that you can't do business in that industry without government control. The FDA is one, others include chemical and weapons manufacturing. Whether you have an office in the country isn't really as important as jumping through all the hoops in the country... and you're gonna need someone in-country to jump through the hoops. Hence, having an office for them to work out of, because you can't run a business out o

    • But practically speaking, it's not much different than other forms of regulation.

      It is dramatically different because it gives people Putin can arbitrarily arrest, torture, and execute. People Putin can hold hostage.

      An internet company does not need in-country employees to follow (or choose to ignore) regulations.

    • Reminds me of Voice of America. Just broadcast radio beams over the border and see how well they can block access. Fast forward to now and it's much easier to block internet access instead.

  • They'll become a little bit Russian.

  • US investment in Russia should be banned (Score:3)

    by couchslug ( 175151 ) on Tuesday November 23, 2021 @04:55PM (#62014523)

    Russia is an enemy society, not a society with an enemy government (individual Russians could not matter less).

    Investment of any kind in Russia supports the Kremlin. All US desire to invest there is socially treasonous which is why governments should step in to stop it.

    Investors desiring to put money into Russia are enemies of the West to be crushed not tolerated. The Cold War never ended and anyone contending otherwise is a Kremlin shill or worse, a childish fool. Neither merit respect. The West (meaning Western people not just governments) need to harden the fuck up and face their old enemy instead of wanting a different reality they can never, ever have due to Russian nationalist culture making it a permanent threat to Europe.

  • I'll open up a taco stand with the Alphabet name. First on the menu is a specialty taco called "Gibel' Putina." It comes complete with some kabuli palaw with a side of borscht flavored with goat piss.

    • This is goverment. Very used to control the population with law. They will reguate/define what that means to their benefit and likely leaving a discretionaly powers on their side.

      In other news though, Google is already hiring in Moscow:

      https://careers.google.com/loc... [google.com]

  • "Roskomnadzor said firms that violate the legislation could face advertising, data collection and money transfer restrictions, or outright bans."

    That doesn't sound so bad. In the US, we face advertising every day.

  • Back in the 80s, when porn was still considered that sleazy stuff that you don't really want to touch, porn mags were in a pickle: Laws concerning "decency" were so crappy around here that you couldn't even be sure that a picture of an Amish woman in full kit couldn't be considered "indecent" by a judge .So what porn mags did was to hire a bum from the street, pay him handsomly and make him head editor. If (or when) the shit hit the fan and someone had to go behind bars for those lewdy rudy nudy pics, the b

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