If I make a product for global use and Russian use, am I malicious for telling Russian customers that I’ll cut out information on homosexuality by Russian law? Or is the malice in Russia requiring that? Can we expect companies, especially international conglomerates, to give up on potential markets in order to protest a law?
(This is not a caricature, this is more or less what a couple of Russian acquaintances working on YouTube at Google tell me. One could also say the same, mutatis mutandis, for China or India or Saudi Arabia, but I know much less about what’s happening there. Also intentionally not the most outrageous example, only the one that hopefully hits closest to home for a Western audience.)
I see the similarities. However, there's a difference between selling a technical solution and publishing social information. There's also a vast difference between doing special work to appease one target country so you can sell there compared to choosing whether or not to lose the entire world outside your home country because you can offer some protection but not the best protection to foreign buyers. 40 bits was not nearly as easy to break in 1998 as it is now.
If I make a product for global use and Russian use, am I malicious for telling Russian customers that I’ll cut out information on homosexuality by Russian law? Or is the malice in Russia requiring that? Can we expect companies, especially international conglomerates, to give up on potential markets in order to protest a law?
(This is not a caricature, this is more or less what a couple of Russian acquaintances working on YouTube at Google tell me. One could also say the same, mutatis mutandis, for China or India or Saudi Arabia, but I know much less about what’s happening there. Also intentionally not the most outrageous example, only the one that hopefully hits closest to home for a Western audience.)