> March 2021, Apple reportedly agrees to preinstall Russian software
Wait, this regulation is a result of an antitrust case against Google and Apple started by Yandex, as both were using their platforms against their direct competitor. The same thing that many people want to see in EU and US. Clearly it doesn't belong to the list and the author did zero research on this, but included anyway because it fits the bad guy narrative they are trying to push.
What's even funnier is that Apple threatened to withdraw from the russian market rather than having to do this, so the question is who's the real bad guy here (how about "a tech giant threatens an unimportant country to be able to bully domestic competitors"?). I guess everybody is horrible in this story, because the government had to compromise and omit the requirement to be able to uninstall this software, and they also included many companies who were large enough to be able to lobby their interests, because obviously they didn't want to make a single company special. Now Samsung reportedly has a backdoor deal with Yandex to install their software as system on Samsung phones, so it's being shoved down customers' throats. Nice.
And unlike say the copies of Facebook that Samsung has preinstalled, you can delete these afterward if you change your mind and decide you don’t want it. They’re not unremovably baked into the system.
> What's even funnier is that Apple threatened to withdraw from the russian market rather than having to do this, so the question is who's the real bad guy here
Problem is that Apple for years claims moral high ground, while they’re happily cooperating with authoritarian governments around the world. They can claim moral high ground if they leave after threatening, not just for threatening.
You have to put your money where your mouth is. Like Facebook did with China (not saying they have moral high ground, but that’s an example of company losing tons of profits and helping competition grow, to avoid bending to authoritarian government).
Exactly. I have been saying Apple is now walking on the same path as Google once did. Their "Do No Evil" line.
Had Apple never claimed moral high ground, they would then have the benefit of doubt. And increasingly there are more and more evidence their words and actions differs.
From what I remember Apple had the philosophy caring about their customer, which in 2021 encompass security and data protection. But it's unrelated to banning apps and freedom of speech. They are compliant with local regulations the same as a bank service, a wifi router or any manufactured product have to be compliant. So I would say it's more of a recent marketing problem, it's true they care about customers, but they go too far as saying they are human rights advocates (and also their focus on services put them in a more difficult position like Google or Facebook which IMHO they were not before as a product company).
> Now Samsung reportedly has a backdoor deal with Yandex to install their software as system on Samsung phones, so it's being shoved down customers' throats.
No clear evidence, sorry, you're right. It's only a rumor that is circulating everywhere, I should have made this clear but only realized this now. Another poster above/below noted that it might have been a misunderstanding of the law by Samsung, according to Yandex CEO. Which is also possible of course. (nonetheless, they still shipped unremovable software in a firmware update)
I don’t care whether it was antitrust decision by (kangooroo) courts or not. As a Russian, I don’t want to use Yandex in any capacity since it’s complicit with oppressive regime and gradually becomes part of it, sharing data and targeting citizen with surveillance. One of the reasons I used Apple is because it was relatively free of Russian state-sponsored spyware.
Trust me, I don't have a single illusion about Yandex or the government. Neither I say the solution was perfect (it's terrible and awkward like most regulations are). But I also don't have any illusions about any other company. Making it sound like Apple is cooperating with some nefarious plot is a stretch. They've been forced to back down in a fairly clear case. Dealing with Yandex own business ambitions or the government spyware or regulatory overreach are entirely different questions that are out of the scope of this case and should be solved in their specific ways.
American corporations also help thugs, racketeers, and police target you. Did you not recently see the scandal with police and repo agents (and anyone else willing witu the money) paying for location data of users?
Besides, can you not simply uninstall or not use Yandex or Mail.ru?
You can buy at least Americans' fine grained location data, sold by corporations. The government in fact argues that it's not subject to fourth amendment protections since it's just available on the open market.
You don't have to use dark web here either, the data brokers are regular companies with physical addresses and everything. It's just not common because people don't know about it, but there are no practical or legal barriers.
And I know about this from outside of the verge, I just believe in providing citations.
The difference is a fantasy at least in the US. Your online activity even if protected by the company and not sold on the open market is subject to the subpoena powers of the state. These powers apply to all "business records" and have been contorted to serve as a justification of mass surveillance.
This illustrates the how governments are using tech companies to do their dirty work. They are the velvet glove over the iron hand of the state. They conceal and enable that which would otherwise be an obvious authoritarian grab prevented by civil liberties providing a convenient fig leaf over over otherwise naked government power.
I would expect this to be the case in all jurisdictions these companies operate in.
There is a difference between this and VK (owned by Mail.ru) basically having a web interface for police or anyone with money to read your messages.
You can bring a lot of “Apple is just as bad” outsider evidence, but I don’t know anyone who had their data leaked by Apple.
Yet I have dozens of anecdotal cases of people harrassed and targeted by using Russian networks. I mean you can basically buy my phone call history and parking surveillance for a few bucks online.
> There is a difference between this and VK (owned by Mail.ru) basically having a web interface for police or anyone with money to read your messages.
The only difference is that while US law enforcement can read Facebook messages, it has no interest in Ivan from Samara. But have no illusion: every government wants as much access to data as it can, and will use it against you.
As an American, I use Yandex image search for any sort of 'edgy' meme that I want to find again - Google image search has been filtering anything that might offend.
You can delete and not use the yandex software in this case right? It seems more like govt mandated but removable crapware added more for protectionist reasons than spying reasons in this case.
As a Russian you could try to change your government. I don't really understand what people want here. Companies to ignore the laws made by sovereign governments?
That's cyberpunk stuff.
> I don’t want to use Yandex in any capacity since it’s complicit with oppressive regime and gradually becomes part of it, sharing data and targeting citizen with surveillance
Really? So the USA and it’s allies don’t spy, and aren’t oppressive? What do you do with the information revealed by Snowden (about the NSA and Prism), Assange, and with the Crypto AG story?
I’m curious if you see those those things as less severe than Russia’s oppression/corruption?
>those things as less severe than Russia’s oppression/corruption?
These things are vastly less severe than anything going on in Russia (am Russian). In the US there is at least due process, public scrutiny, and the US government doesn't generally torture or murder its citizens(on its soil). Comparing the situations in these two countries is like comparing current protest killings in Myanmar, and police shootings in the US with the words "see, in the US the police also kill citizens", i.e. it's dropping 99% of the context and of the cultural situation/differences/beliefs.
Speaking first and foremost about actions against its own people, none of the (real and troublesome) activities of the US government are in the same league as what the oppressive authoritarian Russian state is doing. The comparison is insulting (to the intelligence of the reader, first and foremost).
Yandex cooperates with the Russian state, which sends people to (horrendous, torturous) prisons for, among other things, reposting a meme critical of its hard line of oppressing LGBT people. It assassinates domestic political opponents. It snoops on, disrupts and if necessary curtails any serious efforts at political organizing. No comparison can be made with the US government.
The US government sends people to prison for owning the wrong plant or the wrong type of lobster. It assassinates political opponents - definitely foreign, likely domestic. It snoops on, disrupts and if necessary curtails any serious efforts at political organizing (they actually called Zuckerberg in front of Congress because Facebook was not censoring enough people! Facebook! That was freaking mind-blowing.)
If you're Chinese or Russian, ignore my comment. But if you're an American, you need a bit of perspective. Literally most countries on Earth do orders of magnitude of worse stuff on a daily basis than US. And literally no other country has an egalitarian setup where anyone can potentially succeed. The countries that are objectively better than US in terms of human rights for own citizens, are very few (Switzerland, Nordic countries, few others which are either small/or have homogeneous population). I am stunned when I read comments suggesting that US is as bad or Russia or China.
> If you're Chinese or Russian, ignore my comment. But if you're an American, you need a bit of perspective. Literally most countries on Earth do orders of magnitude of worse stuff on a daily basis than US. And literally no other country has an egalitarian setup where anyone can potentially succeed. The countries that are objectively better than US in terms of human rights for own citizens, are very few (Switzerland, Nordic countries, few others which are either small/or have homogeneous population). I am stunned when I read comments suggesting that US is as bad or Russia or China.
Your critique misses the vastness of the violent capitalist system that exists and operates today:
"Place Silicon Valley in its proper historical context and you see that, despite its mythology, it’s far from unique. Rather, it fits into a pattern of rapid technological change which has shaped recent centuries. In this case, advances in information technology have unleashed a wave of new capabilities. Just as the internal combustion engine and the growth of the railroads created Rockefeller, and the telecommunications boom created AT&T, this breakthrough enabled a few well-placed corporations to reap the rewards. By capitalising on network effects, early mover advantage, and near-zero marginal costs of production, they have positioned themselves as gateways to information, giving them the power to extract rent from every transaction.
Undergirding this state of affairs is a set of intellectual property rights explicitly designed to favour corporations. This system — the flip side of globalisation — is propagated by various trade agreements and global institutions at the behest of the nation states who benefit from it the most. It’s no accident that Silicon Valley is a uniquely American phenomenon; not only does it owe its success to the United States’ exceptionally high defence spending — the source of its research funding and foundational technological breakthroughs — that very military might is itself what implicitly secures the intellectual property regime." [1]
Can you show me a critique that is more clear and true than this? I have quoted it a million times and that's because I just haven't heard a better explanation.
An area where capitalist firms are doing a lot of damage using their IP system is in the global south:
"The possibility of a handful corporations monopolizing healthcare and agriculture in the developing world is a very real risk today. Closely associated with these corporations, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF) - the richest and the most powerful philanthropic foundation shaping these sectors globally - aids them in the process of monopolization by granting huge funds to its network of NGOs to carry out activities which mainly benefit these selected corporations, in many of which the foundation has considerable financial stakes.
Apart from making such grants, through the vehicle of Public Private Partnerships (PPP), the foundation also has been facilitating the flow of millions of dollars of taxpayer money into what are essentially private projects.
The foundation also plays a crucial role in lobbying for stronger IPR regimes which oblige developing countries to grant long patent periods for drugs which are only minor alterations of already existing, off-patent drugs. In Africa, this foundation is one of the most powerful forces that is arm-twisting governments to gradually rewrite seed laws to provide patent protection for commercial seeds, which would eventually require criminalization of all non-certified seeds.
[...]
Far from aiding the production of cheap drugs by generic pharma through means such as technology transfers, the corporate giants, including Bill Gates’ Microsoft, “lobbied vociferously” for acceptance of TRIPS agreement, which obliged member countries to agree to grant patents to pharmaceutical companies for a minimum period of 20 years. Microsoft again lobbied the G8 in 2007 to strengthen the protection of global Intellectual Property Rights (IPR), which, Oxfam warned, is bound to “worsen the health crisis in developing countries”, the New Internationalist reported.
Stifling the development of generic pharma by lobbying for stronger Intellectual Property Rights regime (which, contrary to incentivizing innovation as is widely claimed, has the opposite effect as demonstrated by many empirical studies including one by U.S government ); facilitating a flow of enormous subsidies into private projects of closely associated pharmaceutical companies, not only by making philanthropic grants but also by channelizing through GAVI alliance the public money granted by various states; and protecting selected corporations from potential competition in the market by locking countries receiving assistance through this programme into long-term commitments to buy vaccinations they manufacture - all appear to be a multi-pronged strategy to monopolize the global healthcare industry. And being “the single most influential voice in global health”, Bill Gates is more than well-qualified to be at the helm of this machine." [2]
People like Gates grew up with access to an immense amount of privileged high quality knowledge, theories and pedagogical material available to them - access to the immense inheritance of humanity's scientific explorations. Yet what makes them powerful is that they have kicked away the ladders they themselves used to climb up in the first place.
The US and it's capitalist allies are powerful because they have created one big corrupt intellectual property system that favors the already powerful capitalists. There is no opting out of it. Through IP laws this system criminalizes sharing and turns inventions and science into commodities to be bought and sold. Helping ourselves and other humans is criminalized.
If the boy geniuses of Silicon Valley are so genius, why do they need to turn something that is not scarce (knowledge/science/inventions) into something scarce, and lock it away as a trade secret? How can we speak about egalitarianism when this system is so clearly the opposite of that? This system is not democratic, it's a bourgeois run prison.
> Literally most countries on Earth do orders of magnitude of worse stuff on a daily basis than US.
The reason there is violence in other countries is exactly because people in these countries are deeply implicated and entangled in the global capitalist production system, which is being led and directed by global north capitalists.
Wait, this regulation is a result of an antitrust case against Google and Apple started by Yandex, as both were using their platforms against their direct competitor. The same thing that many people want to see in EU and US. Clearly it doesn't belong to the list and the author did zero research on this, but included anyway because it fits the bad guy narrative they are trying to push.
What's even funnier is that Apple threatened to withdraw from the russian market rather than having to do this, so the question is who's the real bad guy here (how about "a tech giant threatens an unimportant country to be able to bully domestic competitors"?). I guess everybody is horrible in this story, because the government had to compromise and omit the requirement to be able to uninstall this software, and they also included many companies who were large enough to be able to lobby their interests, because obviously they didn't want to make a single company special. Now Samsung reportedly has a backdoor deal with Yandex to install their software as system on Samsung phones, so it's being shoved down customers' throats. Nice.