Hacker News Reader

Comment by eliben | Hacker News Reader

The relations of tech giants with totalitarian governments like Russia is a typical tragedy of the commons. The only step that makes sense for the common good is to remove all business from that country. But Facebook can't do it, because then Google will get all the profits, and Google/Yahoo/whomever can't do it for the same reason. If they all could just agree...

View on HN

Holy hell, there's more to this world than profit. Of course Facebook has a choice. Or more directly in this case, Zuckerberg does. If he can unilaterally spend $19b on Snapchat and have "The Fucking CEO" on his business card, then he can certainly say, "we're pulling out of Russia, because there are more important things than money". This is disgusting.

> "we're pulling out of Russia, because there are more important things than money"

if he really thinks like that, he won't be as rich as he is today (and i m also speaking generically about those who are very rich). You don't become _that_ successful without giving up something.

Unless I missed another story this week Google is leaving Russia.

http://www.businessinsider.com/google-pulls-out-of-russia-20...

Closing their office but still providing their services to users inside the Russian firewall.

Of course Facebook has a choice. It may cost them some money, but refusing to collaborate with totalitarian governments is an option. Look at Google versus China. Google had the courage to resist Chinese censorship and I really respect them for that.

Lets not forget that Google complied with Chinese censorship requests until China hacked them. As long as only minorities are the victim then these Internet giants don't give a damn. So now we just wait until Russia bans Facebook for other reasons and watch Facebook collect goodwill when they turn around and start to "stand up against censorship".

Let's also not forget that China hacked Google's portal for the federal intelligence to understand what surveillance operations were being done against their country.

Russia may ultimately ban Facebook for similar reasons. China eventually decided that it wouldn't deal with the US's weaponization of large web corporations - this may eventually be the end state of all the large powers.

Bot google and facebook have very strong domestic competitors in Russia. So their withdrawal from the country would achieve exactly nothing.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com