Any handy links for that Google-Russia story? It’s not that I don’t believe, because I do (IMO this is something that Google would have done) it’s just that I’m on mobile and am too lazy to search for those links myself.

That episode has near no coverage in English, and I don't think much of coverage in Russian survived to this day.

But here is it in basics:

Russian opposition was completely dominating the Internet at the time, before around 2005, a complete opposite of the picture on the TV, and fake opinion polls.

Kremlin was not happy, and went straight to the Internet's "kingmaker" — Google (or maybe it was the other way around?) Publicly it was to get its officers "taught" about internet media, but the writing on the wall was way more obvious.

At around late 2005, Google announces them "optimising their algorithms against abuse," and within weeks opposition's websites start to disappear from Google one after another. Google obviously claim "we did not hardcode anything," but simply rearranging the word order in search was enough to expose them doing that.

At the same time, we saw a wave of very weird adsense political ads on sites associated with opposition, and a wave of exhilarating pro-Putin drivel in Western media, clearly suggesting they got some Western spin masters on their side now.

There is an easier explanation: Kremlin just started to spend money on its Internet presence and opposition could not match it, which got amplified by more people getting connected to the Internet (thus instead of tech savvy crowd sympathetic to opposition, you get a bigger share of conservative "simple man"). Opposition just got relaxed and thought that Internet will be their home ground forever. And it's far easier for opposition to blame Google for collusion with the government, than to work hard on quality of their websites. Compare the old "non-systematic opposition" influence with the drive behind people like Navalny and you can see that there is no conspiracy, just laziness vs hard work.

Even that wouldn't mean nearly all opposition media vanishing from the Internet in the span of few weeks.

Any independent confirmation of those allegations?

In my personal experience Meduza articles are near the top for some topics and several years ago Dozhd was popular as well, also sometimes I get links to opposition LJ blogs. Also there was a large shift to Telegram channels from traditional websites.

It would be really helpful if you could link to a source for this information, even something of ill repute.

Um, I thought Yandex was the dominant search engine in Russia, not Google?

It wasn't really, it only managed to clearly dominate long after Google's interest in Russia cooled down.

It's a blatant lie. Google never was as dominant in Russia, as in the US or Europe, at best times it had 50-60% of market share (mostly thanks to Android popularity). In 90s Russian market had quite popular Rambler and Apport, whose share got mostly absorbed by Yandex later.

I suggest that you read that account's post history before you believe their claims.

I read their history, and I don’t know what you mean with this comment. Could you link to specific examples? I don’t know them, but their comments seem well reasoned.

It's hilarious that this unsourced made up story is near the top of this comment thread. People've gotten quite conspiratorial about big tech I guess.

Here's an actual story about Google and China: https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/01/why-g...

Google quit China for 6 years, tried to go back, got outed again and shut down again.

If we are calling for treason charges, there really needs to be a link to a reliable source

> Don't you think that C-levels of all of them were previously dying to get into China, and were ready to do anything?

> ...

> treason

In the case of China, doesn't the US government in some ways encourage this? I forget the colloquial name for the "policy" (if you can call it that, because I don't think it's codified into law), but isn't the idea that if the US shares some of the fruits of capitalism and liberal democracy with China, the people of their country may follow suit?

> if the US shares some of the fruits of capitalism and liberal democracy with China, the people of their country may follow suit?

You don't share liberal democracy by teaming up with rogue regimes against it.

I'm not saying the policy is worthwhile or even justifiable, but the comment I replied to later used the word "treason" (sorry, I didn't quote it) which implies that these actions aren't endorsed, and certainly not encouraged, by the US government.

I want to put people's attention on distinguishing in between actual sharing of fruits, vs Western companies coming to repressive regimes without good faith in mind from the start.

Sorry, I didn't mean to detract from that point. I completely agree.