Google, Apple remove Navalny app from stores as Russian elections begin • Hacker News Board

Re: Google, Apple remove Navalny app from stores as Russian elections begin

#441

Post by Closi » Fri, Sep 17, 2021, 3:04 PM UTC

deltron3030 wrote: post #177

Closi wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Very sad when not even the massively rich will bother to do the right thing. The issue is Google and Apple isn't owned by one massively rich person. They are owned by tens of thousands of shareholders, many extremely wealthy but most small, including both individual investors but also pension funds and hedge funds, and the CEO & Board are legally obligated to act in their fiduciary interest.

> CEO & Board are legally obligated to act in their fiduciary interest. Short or long term? Because shitting on democracy for money is potentially very damaging for brands in the long term, the market and especially future comptetitors will remember it.

> Short or long term? Because shitting on democracy for money is potentially very damaging for brands in the long term, the market and especially future comptetitors will remember it.

In a perfect world this would be the case.

In the real world, their competitors won't exit these markets and will grow to fill the space left by them. This means that their competitors will grow which is probably more of a competitive threat to them in the long term.

i.e. if Google leaves China, the main impact to them would be the rise of TOS+ and the loss of their small market-share in China to Baidu. This would also be playing directly into the chinese government's hands who have a strong foothold on Baidu and Tencent.

Re: Google, Apple remove Navalny app from stores as Russian elections begin

#442

Post by [deleted] » Fri, Sep 17, 2021, 3:06 PM UTC

m3kw9 wrote: post #434

oliwarner wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except that by this point, all this is expected behaviour. If companies don't want to be complicit in these crimes, they need to extricate themselves from the country and cut all ties. If they do want to put profit ahead of everything else, then whatever, but you don't get to defend them as doing the right thing for their employees. They're enabling the whole situation. [Edit to bring in a sister question] "Why don't…

Casually suggesting that Apple should pull out from all authoritarian countries is both funny and naive

[deleted]

Re: Google, Apple remove Navalny app from stores as Russian elections begin

#443

Post by sannysanoff » Fri, Sep 17, 2021, 3:06 PM UTC

hnlmorg wrote: post #135

oleganza wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm no fan of political power in Russia (my home country) or anywhere else in the world, but come on with this double-standard bullshit. Every country does exactly the same thing. Just look at how much suppression of "alternative voices" happens in real time all over the world and what apps were banned, accounts closed etc. Jan 6 was painted as bad as 9/11, ffs. It may be staged differently so it's not the "governmen…

> Every country does exactly the same thing. They don't though. Sure, there is some level of corruption and media bias in every country but few countries have dictatorships which will threaten imprisonment (or worse) of anyone who speaks out against the current government. However I do agree with your secondary point that the solution isn't to create a tech vacuum, it's to create technology that can't be controlled b…

> few countries have dictatorships

Ok, the US outsourced the dictatorship & punishment procedure to twitter, google, apple (e.g. see the ban of Trump and his supporters), ban of alternative media by Visa&co, etc etc. Soft humanitarian dictatorship ;)

> will threaten imprisonment (or worse) of anyone who speaks out against the current government

ok, they just arrested Capitolium protesters and charged 600+ people.

> https://www.insider.com/all-the-us-capitol-pro-trump-riot-ar...

Ah, US calls it 'crime'.. so trivial..

Re: Google, Apple remove Navalny app from stores as Russian elections begin

#444

Post by frogpelt » Fri, Sep 17, 2021, 3:08 PM UTC

oliwarner wrote: post #253

viktorcode wrote: post #85

Reuters doesn't report this, but the government officials threatened the companies (Apple and Google) with jail time for their employees yesterday. After that the companies finally conceded. There's a short video fragment from the meeting of the government officials and the companies representatives. It's worth watching, especially if you come from a democratic nation. Letting your Russian employees be persecuted don…

Except that by this point, all this is expected behaviour. If companies don't want to be complicit in these crimes, they need to extricate themselves from the country and cut all ties. If they do want to put profit ahead of everything else, then whatever, but you don't get to defend them as doing the right thing for their employees. They're enabling the whole situation. [Edit to bring in a sister question] "Why don't…

Apple would pull out of China if their sales dropped 50% because they wouldn't.

Re: Google, Apple remove Navalny app from stores as Russian elections begin

#445

Post by travisgriggs » Fri, Sep 17, 2021, 3:08 PM UTC

pigeonhole123 wrote: post #421

travisgriggs wrote: post #419

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where does that stop though? I agree with you, but I don’t see how the basic observe-eval-withdraw loop ever terminates. Or put from a flip side… Building apps in highly democratic Norway just for Norwegians to use because they’re the best democracy (for example) doesn’t make enough money to feed my family. So why do anything at all?

The fact that you have to draw the line somewhere is not an argument for not drawing a line somewhere.

Indeed. Can you say that the parties involved do not have lines? Everyone has lines, they’re just not always visible.

My point that the observe-eval-withdraw loop is difficult to terminate is not meant to argue we shouldn’t run the loop, but rather how difficult it is to code the withdraw conditions. As I tried to allude to in the second paragraph, you have to balance out the withdraw conditions with the pragmatic need to let the loop get some worthwhile work done.

Re: Google, Apple remove Navalny app from stores as Russian elections begin

#446

Post by envy2 » Fri, Sep 17, 2021, 3:08 PM UTC

viktorcode wrote: post #85

Reuters doesn't report this, but the government officials threatened the companies (Apple and Google) with jail time for their employees yesterday. After that the companies finally conceded. There's a short video fragment from the meeting of the government officials and the companies representatives. It's worth watching, especially if you come from a democratic nation. Letting your Russian employees be persecuted don…

Companies shouldn't put themselves in this position: they should simply refuse to have a local presence or local employees in authoritarian-leaning countries.

Re: Google, Apple remove Navalny app from stores as Russian elections begin

#447

Post by blacktriangle » Fri, Sep 17, 2021, 3:08 PM UTC

a123b456c wrote: post #429

tablespoon wrote: post #408

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If they do want to put profit ahead of everything else, then whatever, but you don't get to defend them as doing the right thing for their employees. They're enabling the whole situation. IMHO, cooperating with an authoritarian regime in this way should be illegal, sort of like a sanctions violation. Cook and Pachai should go to jail for this. That consequence might clarify their thinking a little.

Define "authoritarian regime"

The CCP

Re: Google, Apple remove Navalny app from stores as Russian elections begin

#448

Post by saurik » Fri, Sep 17, 2021, 3:09 PM UTC

tailspin2019 wrote: post #327

tolmasky wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Allow side-loading so that you don’t leave yourself open to a situation where the only way your customers get access to a voting app is by having your employees jailed. The AppStore creates an easily exploitable bottleneck for governments to take advantage of. The hkmap.live situation during the protests in Hong Kong was similar.

As much as I like a lot of the benefits of the walled garden (from a consumer perspective, not necessarily as a developer), this is actually a very good argument for side-loading and one that I hadn't thought about before.

~4 years ago I gave a talk at Mozilla Privacy Lab (perfected from a talk I gave at 360|iDev) that focused on these moral reasons for not having centralized systems, looking at everything from government control to the tyranny of the majority, that I called "That's How you Get a Dystopia".

https://youtu.be/vsazo-Gs7ms

As far as I am concerned, you absolutely cannot have centralized control over something like "all software distribution" without being actively complicit with such regimes, and that people working for Apple have chosen to normalize this is unconscionably immoral :(.

Re: Google, Apple remove Navalny app from stores as Russian elections begin

#449

Post by eldaisfish » Fri, Sep 17, 2021, 3:10 PM UTC

michaelt wrote: post #438

a123b456c wrote: post #429

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Define "authoritarian regime"

Just because there are shades of grey, doesn’t mean we can’t tell black from white.

it's an excellent question which your reply doesn't address.

There's black and white with grey in between. Whether you report the shades of grey as black or white depends on who you ask and what is offered for comparison.

Is india an authoritarian regime? You'll find plenty of evidence going both ways. What about Belarus? Hungary? Venezuela?

The grey is precisely why having yes/no binaries like this leads to more confusion.

Re: Google, Apple remove Navalny app from stores as Russian elections begin

#450

Post by oliwarner » Fri, Sep 17, 2021, 3:11 PM UTC

m3kw9 wrote: post #434

oliwarner wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except that by this point, all this is expected behaviour. If companies don't want to be complicit in these crimes, they need to extricate themselves from the country and cut all ties. If they do want to put profit ahead of everything else, then whatever, but you don't get to defend them as doing the right thing for their employees. They're enabling the whole situation. [Edit to bring in a sister question] "Why don't…

Casually suggesting that Apple should pull out from all authoritarian countries is both funny and naive

That is what I think, but that's not the point of my post.

The part you're reading around is the people here defending Apple and Google's behaviour, because they're just doing what's right for their employees.

Doing what's right for Apple and Google's employees is not setting up offices in front of Russia's loaded gun, which we've only known about for… hundreds of years. Apple and Google put their employees at risk. They don't get points for doing more bad things to further delay that risk (and feed the machine that made that enables the risk).

My naïveté is certainly worth considering, but we're all so wilfully blind to atrocities. It was one thing to let another country beat up its citizens and attempt to sanction them, but now we're each personally entangling our lives with companies that aid and abet. We have to demand better.