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Comment by devoply | Hacker News Reader

At the end of the day, creating many of these services is trivial. Creating a LinkedIn clone is trivial, and one will pop up in Russia giving some Russian owners profit and creating jobs for Russians. So how it's bad for the Russian economy, or the economy of any country to do this, is beyond me. On the other hand, dictatorships and capitalist democracies love to gather as much information as they can on their citizens, so it will allow Russians to get more information on their citizens. Which may be bad for some of them.

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> Creating a LinkedIn clone is trivial

Sure, but reaching a critical mass isn't. And for Russian freelancers looking for work outside of Russia a Russian LinkedIn isn't helpful. Maybe the problems with this regulation will be more obvious if a service like Github is blocked.

We actually had Github banned in Russia once or twice for short periods of time (like hours or days). Because of some repository contained joke text about how to commit suicide.

LinkedIn clone already exists for quite a long time. The professionali.ru service even copied the original design when it was launched. Not successful. :)

The real alternative - startup MoiKrug.ru ("my circle"), that was launched in mid-2000s - was purchased by Yandex, made irrelevant by lack of clear strategy and finally sold to some other investor.

Oh my, are they still around? I was one of the volunteers on the team back in 2006.

It's not about the economy, it's about control. Give them control or get out. Eventually the only companies left are those that will acquiesce to Russian demands.

From how I understanding "Russian state philosophy" (if there's such a thing) I'd even intuitively assume they're not necessarily primarily interested in gathering everything-about-everyone but in ensuring no other party (especially private western/multinational corps) gain potentially such an information advantage over them. We've arrived in an age when non-sovereign entities can gain leverage over sovereign entities and thus become "geopolitical players", to be "reckoned with".

That's my understanding of it, also. Just the other day I was discussing with a work colleague about what would have happened had FB not been blocked in China almost from the very beginning. Imagine all the Chinese' people data sitting on a server a couple of keystrokes away from entities like the NSA. Our example, made half-jokingly, was something along the lines of: "Imagine how much information you can gain just by tracking the GPS positions of the personal secretaries attached to important Chinese Communist Party power figures".

Totally. It's about control now, the possibility of control in the future, and taking away opportunities for control over you from your adversaries.

Same as National Security Letter. You give the government what it wants, or else. At the end of the day the difference is soft power vs. hard power. The thugs dressing in nice suits and having their agents mess your business up through audits or lawsuits, or thugs sending their secret police to mess you up. The end result is they get what they want no matter what.

Uh... You can't send a national security letter to a foreign company that has no presence in the US. Well, you can probably send it, but since the foreign company is not bound by US laws, they can ignore it and even publish it (this is my understanding, IANAL).

The whole point of this Russian law is to remove this limitation.

I guess the question is what qualifies as presence in your view. LinkedIn has a presence in Russia due to it's Russian clientele, that's why Kremlin is going after them in the first place.

This is only party relevant, but in the past few years the US started going after people solely based on the fact that they have some money in a US bank (and no other ties, i.e. 'presence'). So now you have the US Federal court in Brooklyn prosecuting the FIFA corruption scandal.

The original point stands, I think. If a state actor has interest in your affairs, they will find legal ways to spy on you, or create new laws so they can. Honestly, the NSA scandal, and the gross violation of personal privacy in the US after 9/11 should have taught people that. And the US is the bastion of modern democracy (saying this w/o sarcasm) to boot.

The State department has gone after companies that had no US presence, they did so on the basis of Americans using the website which they feel gives them jurisdiction. It's very similar to that.

What are some of those companies? I'd be curious to read about that. Because it doesn't sound like the state dept. has any legal basis here, just American specialism.

At any rate, US is not the bastion of freedom that Russia's actions should be compared to. Especially so when it involves three-letter agencies.

To clarify the distinction I'm trying to make - yes, US doing some shady shit, mostly trying to keep it in secret. Russia is explicitly legalizing such shady shit. And doing even shadier shit in secret.

Because a large part of the Russian software market is overseas.and many developers work on contract. Further, this helps the Kremlin's agenda which has lead to economic stagnation, and the average gdp of Russians dropping below that of China.

Doesn't seem like it: https://www.google.ca/search?q=russia+gdp

Well, the Chinese median income is double that of Russia though

Are you hoping people won't look past the misleading google chart that ends in 2013?

Russia's GDP has been reliably falling since then. http://www.tradingeconomics.com/russia/gdp-per-capita-ppp

Are you hoping I won't type /china/ in the URL? The statement "average gdp of Russians dropping below that of China" is still not true. Though I am not an expert on the subject, nor do I have a interest in Russia.

http://www.tradingeconomics.com/china/gdp-per-capita-ppp

I thought you were contesting the bigger argument that Russia's economy is stagnating, since the link you provided did not contradict anything else (there was no reference to China).

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