If Apple sold phones in Russia, do they also have to delete those apps there? If the answer is yes, that's very troubling, and it goes beyond complying with US regulations IMO.

By the letter of the law, you’re mistaken.

it bears repeating that laws do not follow morality though, of course.

Personally: I find it deeply uncomfortable that nearly all tech seems to come out of the US, where sanctions and rules are applied unilaterally, with only relatively minor pushback.

I have even had issues supporting users when I was transitioning from bare-metal to cloud due to US sanctions blocking Cuba, Iran and a part of Ukraine (Crimea) which is nearly impossible for us to avoid selling our product to accidentally, dooming anyone living there to buy a product that can never work.

(The product was a multiplayer game)

It does not even matter whether you're coming from US. It matters whether you want to do any business in US or with US organizations.

The app store is a separate business than hardware. They don't have to delete already installed apps, but continuing to distribute them I imagine the US government definitely does have the power to stop.

If it was a result of sanctions then wouldn't Google Play also block them?

Are you comparing genocide to an app being removed from an app store?

Which one of those is comparable to removing an app from an app store?

The point being made isn't that warrantless data harvesting by corporations on behalf of a hostile spy agency is the moral equivalent of a corporation assaulting the ability of innocent civilians trapped in a despotic regime to access outside information, it's that "the government told us we need to" is not a good excuse for perpetrating any social ills.

Would you like to present a case that it's somehow a positive for American companies to condemn innocent Russian civilians to an echo chamber of pro-Russia sentiment, and that freedom of information is somehow a bad thing for those unarmed women and children?

Russia’s media echo chamber is Russia’s own doing. Apple has the right to stop doing businesses with entities they find objectionable.

If they can kick people out for having the wrong shape icon, they can kick them out for anything VK has been accused of.

I think you forgot to mention the "innocent civilians trapped in a despotic regime" part.

Can you please justify Apple's actions with regards to those people in your consequentialist argument?

If you were concerned about the civilians trapped in a despotic regime, why would you give the regime leverage over the people you are trying to help? It would make sense in that light to do exactly what Apple is doing, and nudge people to other platforms.

Deliberately reducing the number of platforms that are accessible from the outside world is what gives the regime MORE leverage, not less. If you take Russians offline, you're just submerging them into state-run TV.

If you let them stay on VKontakte, you let them have more exposure to covert American media campaigns. In the cold war, a huge source of information for people east of the Berlin wall was Radio Free Europe, which was a covert media campaign.

Russians do not have access to just switch to other platforms on a whim the way you seem to think they do. Banning VKontakte from the app store is not going to encourage them to move to a platform like Facebook in a country where people disappear when they circumvent the country's blocks on foreign social media. It's much more analogous to destroying the radios of the Eastern Europeans during the cold war so they can't access any outside news at all.

What makes you so sure all of these actions don't have the opposite effect?

Let's say hypothetically Putin completely ceases in Ukraine and then loses the next Russian election. Now what? Do you think all of that economic damage inflicted upon the Russian people just vanishes?

Isn't it possible the Russian people elect someone even more radical than Putin and make the problem worse? History is full of examples of this.

None of this is really Apple’s responsibility, nor is it reasonable for them to be playing the 4d chess that you’re entertaining.

Apple isn’t a geopolitical humanitarian strategist organization. They’re a for-profit tech company. They sell widget to people with money unless they think it’s in the interest to not do so. Period

> None of this is really Apple’s responsibility, nor is it reasonable for them to be playing the 4d chess that you’re entertaining.

It's okay to put that burden on the Russian people, but not Apple? Why is Apple so special here?

If you're going to make the consequentialist argument that a consequence of the Russian's allowing an echo chamber is Apple can remove apps, then you also need to apply that to Apple. You can't selectively apply logic when it's convenient to your argument and disregard it when it's not.

Russia’s internal affairs are not Apple’s responsibility to fix. Nor is it within their power to do. I entertained someone else’s consequentialist argument above but I never made one myself.

> a consequence of the Russian's allowing an echo chamber is Apple can remove apps

Those are independent things, not a consequence of the other.

You would allow a company to do anything as long as its for-profit? Really?

No, I wouldn’t. We’re talking about removing an app from an App Store. Not “anything”.