Hopefully this intensifies their downward spiral into irrelevance.
Yep. This is why FB, GOOGL, etc needed to be "neutral". The day they caved in is the day their "promise" ended. The demands of censorship will continue. FB is deluding themselves if they think this is a one time deal. And not only that, other countries will start barring FB/GOOGL/etc when it becomes apparent that they are essentially biased political tools.
Enforcing the rules is not straightforward and different parties tend to view things differently. Somebody sees hate speech, someone else valid criticism.
Russia can't direct "BitTorrent" to do something.
And really, it seems like social networks are perfect for these kinds of swarm P2P systems where the protocol is some evolving standard and various clients can interact with it.
I doubt this will drive many users away. Most people just don't care. And most users' friends are in the same country so they'll still have consistent experiences.
If somebody is on an American sanctions list, then Facebook USA making an account for that person on a database located on American soil violates the sanctions. That American citizens can't see the relevant account's data is irrelevant; if anything, it could actually amount to obstruction of justice if American investigators have a warrant to see the relevant data on an American server and it does not appear in the investigator's UI despite the warrant.
The way to solve that is to have different legal entities own different sets of data that exist under different sovereignties and then draw upon the data from each sovereignty through established (although potentially entirely private to Facebook and its foreign subsidiaries operating the foreign servers) protocols.
What is happening here is that Facebook is banning the accounts of political leaders in other countries at the behest of the US and Israel in order to disrupt the organizing efforts of those leaders with their own people.
This has nothing to do with restricting what content is available in the US or Israel but is basically an act of war to disrupt the communications of a foreign enemy.
I'm sure they could make it redirect anywhere they want.
https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20030822-00/?p=...
Not really. China and Russia are the only countries in the world with the political will to ban a company like Facebook or Google where the market actually matters.
The US gov has no legal authority to ban anything. If you fold to them it is just because you are weak and scared or greedy for whatever the are offering you.
When someone in the US govt wants something from Google or Facebook they go to them and remind them about anti-trust law and the FTC and tell them that if they do what they are told they will have people in secret committees telling congressmen and senators that they are vital to national security and to leave them alone.
I'm sure it still requires a huge amount of talent and isn't lacking in meaty, difficult problems, but the core product just seems so unimportant.
From my experience, and based on people I know that work at Facebook, e.g., getting your foot in the door is just a matter of studying medium/hard-level problems on Leetcode (speaking verbatim here). I'm not sure you need a strong foundation in systems programming or design, or even a strong track record of building great software to get hired at these kinds of companies. The metric is mostly Leetcode; it's for efficiency I guess, because of the sheer number of applicants.
I've also worked closely with a few people from such companies. I'd say only one was a great engineer. And he definitely didn't have a high opinion of his former co-workers.
The one company whose engineers I'd probably give the benefit of the doubt would be Netflix, because they're so intentional about "performance".
If someone is a senior engineer at one of those companies, I assume they have a reasonable amount of talent. It's not easy to fake it or avoid expectations as a senior engineer.
Actually FB became a haven for xooglers that wanted to escape deteriorating engineering at lower levels at Google; there is still burning spirit of hacking present, even after IPO. FB works hard to retain it (outside noisy open offices though).
If you ever went through engineering interview process at FB, you'd have noticed it's one notch better prepared than the one at Google. Their Glassdoor rating is even slightly better and there are very few companies that are rated better (and usually smaller like Odersky's Lightbend, JetBrains...), so there is almost nowhere to go for a better engineering experience.