Alena Georgobiani trusts Google search engine results over local rival Yandex, she describes herself as a Russian liberal, PR professional, and lives in Moscow. She downloads her apps to her Android phone from the Google Play Store and archives her files using Google’s cloud storage service.
Since Microsoft Teams left Russia in March, it uses Google Meet for most of its business calls. Gmail has been his primary email account for 17 years.
He spent around 200 rubles (€ 3) a month to be able to watch ad-free YouTube videos during smoking breaks. But in early March, its YouTube premium membership went dead when Google suspended its advertising operations in Russia in response to the war in Ukraine.
Revenues for YouTubers and advertisers were blown away, but everyone in Russia was able to watch videos on the platform ad-free for free. “I haven’t seen any ads since the new monetization policy was introduced, I only see them when I turn on the VPN”says Georgobiani, referring to a virtual private network that allows users to browse as if they were in another country.
Georgobiani’s relationship with Google illustrates how deeply rooted the company is within Russia. According to data analytics firm Statista, in 2021 there were more than 91 million YouTube users in Russia, a country of 144 million people. But Google’s business empire is collapsing.
On March 10, the company announced that it would be suspending all its paid services in Russia due to “Payment system interruptions” related to Western sanctions. That same month, Google began relocating staff from its Moscow office to other countries, with many having moved to Dubai in the UAE, according to employees’ LinkedIn profiles.
In May, Google’s Russian branch filed for bankruptcy after a court order blocked its main bank account. Without its bank account, the company may not be able to make money in Russia, but it is committed to continuing to operate. “People in Russia rely on our services to access quality information”a Google spokesperson said.
But what role Google will play in Russian society without a local subsidiary is unclear. Experts are divided on whether these developments represent the beginning of the end for Google in Russia or whether the company will adopt a more antagonistic offshore model. similar to the Telegram messaging app.
The Russian Google account was frozen because it failed to pay the fines it incurred for refusing to remove content that authorities consider illegal, says Laura Brank, head of US law firm Dechert’s Russia Practice. “This is normal procedure for failing to pay a court order, and therefore on paper it is all legal”he adds.
“People say there is no rule of law in Russia. But there are laws and the authorities will follow the procedure, so when Russian consumers are angry [per il blocco di un servizio] they can say, “Look, we’ve had a fair trial here.”
But so far Google hasn’t been blocked. Instead, it is one of the last bastions of US technology left in the country after Facebook, Instagram and Twitter were blocked earlier this year and Microsoft and Amazon left of their own accord.
Although access to Google News was discontinued in Marchin retaliation for linking to sites containing deemed information “Unreliable” from the Kremlin on the situation in Ukraine, the Russians can still access the rest of its services.
Google and the Russian counter offensive
Some analysts have suggested that the government thinks YouTube is too popular to be blocked without risking political pushback or increasing the popularity of VPNs. But others argue that Google’s exemption is linked to the company’s trump card, which is in the pockets of about 75% of Russians.
“Most of the smartphones in Russia are Android (which runs on Google’s operating system), not Apple, because they are cheaper”says Sergey Sanovich, a research associate at Princeton University. “It is technically much more difficult to censor data and mobile applications than websites.”
Also block some Google services without affecting others it could be difficultsays Karen Kazaryan, director and founder of the Moscow-based Internet Research Institute. “Google’s cloud infrastructure is a very complex thing”says Kazaryan. “When you start trying to block something, you can accidentally block something unrelated and then some critical services will stop working.”
The Russian invasion of Ukraine simply escalated the problems the Google subsidiary had already faced in the country. Over the years, the Moscow office has struggled with increasingly stringent laws governing the internet and a steady stream of fines, ranging from $ 11,000 to $ 100 million, for its refusal to remove content.
Google said there will be no changes to YouTube’s content moderation policies related to its filing for bankruptcy. This isn’t even the first time Google has closed an office in Moscow. In 2014, it moved its engineers out of town to protest the new data protection rules.
But in recent years, the stakes have gotten higher. In September 2021, Russian authorities visited one’s home of Google’s top executivestelling her to delete an app linked to activist Alexei Navalny from the Google Play Store or face jail.
When Google hosted the executive at a hotel with a different name, the same agents showed up in her room to tell her that time was still ticking, according to the Washington Post, which didn’t name the executive. Within hours, the app was gone.
Kazaryan thinks that part of the reason Google persevered in Russia despite so many challenges is because its co-founder is Russian. “I think it’s a bit sentimental because of Sergey Brin”, He says. Brin, who lived in the Soviet Union until the age of 5, previously talked about how his experience of growing up in a political system that censored language shaped Google politics.
“It definitely shaped my views and some of my company’s views,” Brin told the New York Times In 2010.
The company’s Russian subsidiary also earned billions of dollars. In an earnings call, Google said 1% of its global revenues came from Russia in 2021, up from 0.5% the year before, which would amount to $ 2.5 billion. the same amount it made from the UK in 2020.
The company would have expected those revenues to grow, says Dan Ives, an analyst at Wedbush. “Google followed the same path as Microsoft, where there were high hopes that they could expand into Russia in the coming decades”he claims.
Google’s bank account lockdown is the result of the company’s ongoing tug-of-war over what the Russian government views as problematic content on its platforms. The irony is that without a Russian branch, the country’s authorities will find it even more difficult to force Google to comply with content moderation rules.
On May 26, Maria Zakharova, a government spokesperson, tried a new tactic: She threatened to expel an American journalist every time YouTube blocked another Russian foreign ministry briefing. “We just came and told him: ‘Block another briefing, and an American journalist or media comes home'”he told the TASS news agency.
“Attempts at punitive actions by the Russian government, such as the attempt to punish Western journalists for Google’s content moderation decisions, show that Russia does not have effective tools to coerce Google.Says Emerson T. Brooking, a senior resident member of the Atlantic Council, an American think tank.
He believes Google is more likely to take on a role non-compliant in Telegram style in Russia rather than being blocked, as it was in China. “Russia doesn’t have a Great Firewall. Russia does not have a strong domestic tech sector that can take on the role of these large Western companies“, he claims. “And as Google retires its employees and physical infrastructure, Russia will find it increasingly difficult to coerce the company.”
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