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BERKELEY, California (AP) — Big Tech companies operating around the world have long pledged to comply with local laws and protect civil rights when doing business. But when Apple and Google bowed to Russia’s demands and removed a political opposition app from their local app stores, it raised concerns that two of the world’s most successful companies were more comfortable bowing to undemocratic orders and maintaining a steady stream of profits. protect the rights of its users.
The app, called Smart Voting, was a tool to organize opposition to Russian President Vladimir Putin ahead of the weekend’s elections. The ban, introduced last week by a couple of the world’s richest and most powerful companies, angered supporters of free elections and free speech.
“This is bad news for democracy and opposition around the world,” said Natalia Krapiva, technical legal counsel for internet freedom group Access Now. “We expect to see other dictators imitating Russia’s tactics,” he said.
Tech companies that provide consumer services, from search to social media and apps, have long walked a tightrope in many of the world’s less democratic nations. As Apple, Google and other big companies such as Amazon, Microsoft and Facebook have become more powerful over the past decade, so do the government’s ambitions to use that power for its own purposes.
“Now this is the poster child for political repression,” said Sascha Meinrath, a professor who studies online censorship issues at Penn State University. Google and Apple “raised the likelihood of this happening again.”
When word of the app’s removal was published last week, neither Apple nor Google responded to requests for comment from the Associated Press; both have been quiet this week.
According to a person with direct knowledge of the matter, Google has faced legal demands from Russian regulators and the threat of criminal prosecutions against individual employees if they fail to comply. The same person said that Russian police visited Google’s Moscow offices last week to enforce a court order to block the app. The person spoke to the AP on the condition that his name not be disclosed due to the sensitivity of the issue.
Google’s own employees reportedly succumbed to Putin’s power play by posting internal messages and images mocking the app’s removal.
This type of backlash has become more common within Google in recent years, as the company’s ambitions clashed with the one-time corporate slogan “Don’t Be Evil” adopted by co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin 23 years ago. Page or Brin, whose family fled the former Soviet Union to the United States as a child, is no longer part of Google’s day-to-day management, and that slogan has long since been cast aside.
Meanwhile, Apple makes a loud “Commitment to Human Rights” on its website, but a close reading of that statement shows that the company will obey the government when legal government orders and human rights conflict. “Where national law and international human rights standards differ, we follow the higher standard,” he says. “In situations where they are in conflict, we respect national law while trying to respect internationally recognized human rights principles.”
A recent report by the nonprofit Freedom House in Washington found that global internet freedom has fallen for the fifth year in a row, adding to an “unprecedented record” as more countries arrest internet users for “nonviolent political, social or religious speech” more than ever before. He found that he was under pressure. According to the report, authorities suspended internet access in at least 20 countries and 21 states blocked access to social media platforms.
For the seventh year in a row, China has topped the list as the worst environment for internet freedom. But such threats take various forms. For example, Turkey’s new social media regulations require platforms with more than one million daily users to remove content deemed “offensive” within 48 hours of notification or risk increased penalties such as fines, ad bans and bandwidth caps.
Meanwhile, Russia has added to the existing “maze of regulations” that international tech companies must navigate in the country, according to Freedom House. Overall online freedom in the US also declined for the fifth consecutive year; The group said it referred to surveillance, harassment and arrests in response to racial injustice protests, along with conspiracy theories and misinformation about the 2020 election.
Major Tech companies have generally agreed to abide by country-specific rules for content removal and other issues to be able to operate in those countries. This can range from direct censorship of opposition parties, as in Russia, where posts about Holocaust denial are illegal in Germany and elsewhere in Europe.
The expulsion of the practice was widely condemned by opposition politicians. Leonid Volkov, one of the top strategists of jailed opposition leader Alexei Navalny, wrote on Facebook that the companies “give up to the Kremlin’s blackmail”.
Navalny’s ally, Ivan Zhdanov, said on Twitter that the politician’s team is considering suing the two companies. He also mocked the move: “Expectations: the government is shutting down the internet. Fact: The internet shuts itself down out of fear.”
Backlash could prompt either or both companies to reconsider their commitments to operate in Russia. Google made a similar decision in 2010 when it removed the search engine from mainland China after the Communist government began censoring search results and videos on YouTube.
Russia is not a big market for Apple, whose annual revenue is expected to approach $370 billion this year, or for Alphabet, Google’s corporate parent company, whose revenue is expected to reach $250 billion this year. But profit is profit.
“If you want to take a principled stance on human rights and freedom of expression, you have some tough choices to make about when to leave the market,” said Kurt Opsahl, general counsel of the digital rights group Electronic Frontier Foundation. .
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Ortatay reported from Oakland, California. Associated Press writers Daria Litvinova from Moscow and Kelvin Chan from London contributed to this story.
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