Semi related, but wondering what role FAANG will play during the sanctions. A russian friend of mine told me google pay/apple pay were very common and preferred ways of payment in russia. Banning those in addition to exclusion from SWIFT would have pretty wide spread consequences for their citizens.
> And perhaps most notably, Mr. Putin and his closest aides and partners in Moscow might not suffer much themselves from sanctions, analysts say....
> Some of the hard-line nationalist men around Mr. Putin were already on a Treasury Department sanctions list and accept that they and their families will no longer have substantial ties to the United States or Europe for the rest of their lives, said Alexander Gabuev, the chair of the Russia in the Asia-Pacific Program at the Carnegie Moscow Center.
> “They are the powerful everybodies in today’s Russia,” he said. “There is a lot of posh richness. They’re totally secluded. They’re the kings, and that can be secured in Russia only.”
> Furthermore, because of their roles in state-owned enterprises and their business ties, they are “the very guys who are directly benefiting from the economy becoming more insulated, more detached from the outside world,” he added.
A quick Google search indicates that Yandex has its own payment system: https://yoomoney.ru/?lang=en probably not equivalent to Apple Pay but it's something.
This is probably a great opportunity for Russian and Chinese tech companies to gain market share as western companies are banned from operating in Russia.
Agreed, I was surprised how wide spread electronic payments were so there will be a big market up for grabs. Doing some quick googling, russia seems to be among the countries with the largest percentages of cashless transactions (~80%). What's interesting about his explanation was that the main motivation for people was trust, if I recall some places wouldn't even let you pay with cash because they did not trust it.
Chinese mobile payment is all based on total knowledge of your identity and constant super-app supervision of your life. You can't separate it from messaging, government services, ID/passport and phone number, etc. I doubt very much that the Russians, governing from an ex-FSB mentality, would allow that type of Chinese 'tech' to operate.
Google / Apple Pay would no longer be allowed to operate there, like how iirc a lot of US businesses were not allowed to operate in Iran (I'm not sure what the current status of that is). People got in trouble for that, too.
I fear that they will overreact and ban what they see as Russian propaganda. E.g https://thegrayzone.com/2022/02/15/russian-un-ambassador-us-... The Grayzone's youtube account may very well be suspended in the coming days. It is the totally wrong strategy for dealing with crackpots but the tech giants have not realized that yet.
if the tech companies "de-platform" Russia on their own does that count as a sanction? I wouldn't think so since it wouldn't have been ordered by a government. I wonder how Russia would react to that, cyber warfare against the company denying them service?
edit: after thinking about it, the above seems like punishing the Russian people more than the Russian government which shouldn't be done IMO
Banning ordinary Russians from using American services would remove the last place where Russians can express their opinions freely, playing into Putin's hands.
Why can’t they spin up a blog? Also, as an American, I don’t think those FAANG places are a safe space for “expressing opinions freely”. The boys (bots) will come.
An independent blog is easily banned. In fact, most of them are already. Platforms like Facebook host millions of pages and use https so it's not possible to ban individual pages, only the whole thing. And they've been hesitant to ban whole social networks because of possible discontent
