There's no way Apple or any company to act as an extralegal entity in another country. Every time something like that comes up, I'm baffled by the expectation that an American company will impose the American values or American laws in another country.
Back in the day when the internet felt like international thing not bound by any local laws, that was possible to some degrees but legislators caught up with it.
It is obvious that you don't sell your crypto finance stuff to Americans, you don't make anti-Putin stuff for Russians, you don't give Saudis encrypted messaging, you don't give Turks gambling apps, you don't sell Nazi stuff to Germans etc. on the internet, unless you are ready to face repercussions. They can try to find a legal angle if they believe there is one and that it will benefit them more than harm them but often there isn't one because gambling is illegal in Turkey, SEC has strict securities regulations in the USA, Putin has an absolute power in Russia and Saudis simply don't allow it.
There is no way Apple or Google or any company facing the repercussions of not complying to the laws of Russia, therefore they will remove from the Russian AppStore whatever they are told to remove.
Allowing alternative AppStores also wouldn't solve it but only delegate it to the people who run those alternative AppStores. Technological solutions to political problems work up until the politicians catch up. The more effective the technological solution the faster they catch up and take care of it.
StarLink for example, a swarm of satellites that can technically provide unrestricted internet to anyone on the planet, will obey the local laws depending on where the user is connecting from.
I know the technologist don't like it but there's no way around it. If you are in Russia, you are in Russia. Get rid of Putin, form a functioning democracy if you like to live in western-like country. No company is not going to provide you with the environment that people in the west built through struggles for generations.
Freedom from oppression is not an American value, and Americans need to stop thinking that. It is a universal value, cherished by people all over the world, including in Russia. The russian people is being taken advantage of by a small oligarchy that steals their resources, and the app that Google and Apple removed was supposed to help them transition to more democracy during the upcoming elections.
Which is means, employees of Apple in Russia go to jail, accounts frozen, offices raided, documents and equipment seized, sales of iPhone banned, access to Apple servers blocked.
That’s something that the public would do. It’s not up to the corporations.
Govt says take that down, the company takes it down, public outrage ensues, govt takes a step back, the company brings it back.
The good thing about governments is that you actually pick the management. Even in not so democratic places it is common and acceptable to take down poor managers through any means.
With companies, you only can hope that the CEO is capable and ethical. That’s why it’s not OK for them to go extralegal. They are supposed to function within the law and their obligations are to the shareholders.
It really is a lowest common denominator. American companies would never impose American values, but they'll bend the knee to any authoritarian country with a juicy market.
Can you please describe what it means to "bend a knee"? It sounds like following the local laws to me. Do you mean something else? What else they are supposed to do? Act as a rough agent? Be the East India Company of the century, recruit mercenaries and compel foreign nations to work they see fit?
There is no law in Russia that prevents Apple from hosting an app called Navalny published by Roman Rubanov. The content of the app is also legal even by Russian standards: it is basically a list of officially registered candidates supported by Navalny.
Maybe you should e-mail Apple and tell them. Give them a law and a business lesson.
Anyway, the idea is that legal or not, it's up to the Russian people to create the environment. Maybe it's legal according to the text(I wouldn't know, not a Russian lawyer) but due to the corruption and power distribution maybe Putin can simply do whatever he wants. A gadget company cannot fix this, if you like to fix it you need to fix it yourself and then you can have companies publishing the Apps you like.
You cannot delegate the job of creating a government and juridical system that has integrity to an American company. It's unreasonable to expect such a thing.
Google and Apple were and still are not complying with Russian laws in many cases [1][2][3][4]. It's being fined and threatened in Russia. So it's not that they comply or not. It's just that they are very picky on when to comply and when not to.
> Allowing alternative AppStores also wouldn't solve it but only delegate it to the people who run those alternative AppStores.
That's the point, though. In and near moral and legal gray zones there's a whole range of plausible judgements; currently there is only not room for anything beyond that set by the incumbents.
Not to mention cases like when people get deplatformed simply for business or political reasons (like Blizzard shutting off individuals outside of China to keep the Chinese market or Apple with the FlickType keyboard).
It means that whatever apple says, they are only driven by the market.
Any stance they have on privacy or security is pure bullshit, they don't and will never give a crap about it, they only care about their revenue, otherwise they wouldn't be in China for example.
In this case, it proves that whatever they say about their stupid store and authoritarian approach to it, it is not and will never be in the interest of their users.
It is just to make it easy for apple to enforce anything, whatever the source of the decision is, a dictator like here, or to destroy competition before launching their own crap like their keyboard on their watch.
If apple would have cared once about their customers, they wouldn't have created an ecosystem that jailed them and would still make it easy for users to install the app they want.
No it is not that obvious and that's my whole point.
The real goal of their app store is not user convenience, security or safety, it's to be able to fully control what the user can and cannot do.
They created the perfect environment to enforce this kind of decision, because that's what their real goal is, this kind of news shows it.
They need to remove all freedom from their users, to feel safe as a business in any kind of market.
If Apple had integrity, they would allow to install apps outside of the store and other stores. This way they could still be within the limits of governments while not putting their own customers in bad situations, but they are fighting really hard against it.
I'm talking about integrity, not criminality though.
They could have rolled out an update allowing users to install apps outside of the store instead of just removing the app from the store for example.
Back in the day when the internet felt like international thing not bound by any local laws, that was possible to some degrees but legislators caught up with it.
It is obvious that you don't sell your crypto finance stuff to Americans, you don't make anti-Putin stuff for Russians, you don't give Saudis encrypted messaging, you don't give Turks gambling apps, you don't sell Nazi stuff to Germans etc. on the internet, unless you are ready to face repercussions. They can try to find a legal angle if they believe there is one and that it will benefit them more than harm them but often there isn't one because gambling is illegal in Turkey, SEC has strict securities regulations in the USA, Putin has an absolute power in Russia and Saudis simply don't allow it.
There is no way Apple or Google or any company facing the repercussions of not complying to the laws of Russia, therefore they will remove from the Russian AppStore whatever they are told to remove.
Allowing alternative AppStores also wouldn't solve it but only delegate it to the people who run those alternative AppStores. Technological solutions to political problems work up until the politicians catch up. The more effective the technological solution the faster they catch up and take care of it.
StarLink for example, a swarm of satellites that can technically provide unrestricted internet to anyone on the planet, will obey the local laws depending on where the user is connecting from.
I know the technologist don't like it but there's no way around it. If you are in Russia, you are in Russia. Get rid of Putin, form a functioning democracy if you like to live in western-like country. No company is not going to provide you with the environment that people in the west built through struggles for generations.