Google Worker Unrest Rises After Removal of Russia Voting App
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
What exactly do Google's workers expect the company to do? As Google moves into being a cloud provider, they have to do this, or they won't have a viable cloud. Already Google is being fined for not being able to store sovereign Russian data in Russia.
On the other hand, it seems to me that if Google wants to attract and retain talent to build out a "viable cloud", they're going to need to continue standing up to tyrants, as they did by exiting CCP-controlled territories in 2010 and reconfirming their integrity in 2019 with the cancelation of Project Dragonfly.
> they have to fulfill some amount of requests from the Russian government
They need to bow to dictators? Why should they give in to requests to remove legitimate content from political rivals? And, honestly, come on here: why are you posting apologies for authoritarian?
> Google got out of China with a lot of noise about human rights and IP, but they plan to stay in most other countries, even ones with corrupt governments.
Why? CCP-controlled territories are a much bigger market than Putin's territories. The article points out that Putin's federation is a relatively minor, regional market:
"Google doesn’t disclose sales in Russia. Next to the U.S. and Europe, Russia’s online ad market is relatively small -- analyst EMarketer estimates $3.82 billion in digital ad spending, with more than half going to search marketing. Yandex NV, a Russia search and internet service, reported 56% national market share in web searches in 2019, making Russia one of the few countries outside of China where Google isn’t the leader."
> Already Google is being fined for not being able to store sovereign Russian data in Russia.
Disingenuous to mention the trivial fine without a figure:
"Meanwhile, in July Google was ordered to pay a fine of 3 million rubles (roughly $41,000) for refusing to store Russians’ personal data on servers in the country."
That said, it sounds like Putin is going to start imposing fines of up to 5 to 20% of annual revenue for companies that don't bring down "illegal content." So, anything pro-democracy (in the sense of legitimate political opposition) or pro-homosexuality would be out, right? Why stay?
At issue here is an app that would give the Russian pro-democracy opposition a fighting chance. Google is now complicit in destroying that opposition.
But let us not exclude Apple from this discussion either they made the same call blocking the pro-democracy app from their app-store too.
So we see a big part of the problem is the duopoly of phone-app-stores Google and Apple have. US government should do something about that in the name of free competition and since it seems to make it possible to use them for crushing democracy. America is pro-democracy after all, at least most of it.
Let us say BOTH Apple and Google were to provide the said pro-democracy app in their stores. I wonder if Russia would choose to not do business with both of them.
Remember Google, do no evil.
As for what I would expect Google to do if I were a Google employee, I would not want them doing business in countries with a history of abuses. We can try to parse what abuse means, but I think we could come up with a reasonable definition.
I find it hard to believe that refusing to do business in Russia could be of strategic consequence, especially given the moral consequences. I am willing to be convinced however.
To win the cloud game you need large volumes of business to justify large amounts of hardware purchases with large discounts. If amazon and Microsoft pick up a bunch of DoD deals, Google will be paying premium for hardware they can get cheaper. That affects costs and therefore profitability. So I think that Google, by not pursuing deals that Amazon and Microsoft have clearly stated they, as a business, want to pursue, would set itself up for being a perennial 3rd or 4th placer (after Oracle of all companies).
The only countries I expect cloud providers to not deal with are the ones prohibited by the country their corporation is legally housed in (countries embargoed or sanctioned by the US, like North Korea, Iran, Syria). If I dislike a country and don't want Google to do cloud business, I'll tell me representative and they can attempt to change the law.
I personally influenced Google's direction in a major business area while only a lowly senior SWE. It's an area that leaders in google then messed up very badly (dammit, jeff, you had ONE JOB).
I quit recently, citing a number of things that I wasn't OK with, one of which is that I felt that the company gave far too much credence to a small group of of noisy people in ways that are hurting the company.
BTW, I, like most long termers, are granted Google stock and some tiny amount of voting shares and some employees have exercised this right https://www.cnbc.com/2018/06/06/google-employees-presenting-...
BTW I'd like to take this opportunity to show a person I disagree with completely, but respect immensely because she's one of the most impactful activists I've ever seen: https://onezero.medium.com/google-workers-lost-a-leader-but-... She helped lead the drive to remove the Real Names requirement from Google+ by directly convincing the principal engineer who ran the real names mapreduce to stop doing it. Of course google wrote a nice "update on google plus" which is no longer available, but see more here https://www.latimes.com/business/technology/la-fi-tn-google-...
It is not about Google "not dealing with Russia". It's about Russia threatening to ban Google, if it allows certain apps, certain free speech, to be downloaded from its app-store.
Google is taking explicit action to suppress democracy, by removing a pro-democracy app from their app-store.
What will they do next? Remove all news critical of Putin from Google's search-results?
if google doesn't want to be in that biz, they should leave the country or find a way to elect a different leader.
I don't think so. Russia can't dictate what kind of free speech Google can serve from its servers in United States can it? Or has Russian law taken over United States already?