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A comment on The Yandex Leak: How a Russian Search Giant Uses Consumer Data. Parent comment

Re:The Yandex Leak: How a Russian Search Giant Uses Consumer... by 0xDEF on Thursday August 10, 2023 @09:03AM (#37075636)
>Also Western billionaire versus Russian oligarch - even if the source of wealth is virtually identical and their political power probably higher in the West.

The term "oligarch" has a specific meaning and, surprisingly, Western media uses the term correctly about the subset of corrupt Russian and Ukrainian businessmen who got rich in the 1990s by buying billions worth of state assets for pennies.

I have never seen Russian tech billionaires like the JetBrains founders being called "oligarchs".

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Re:The Yandex Leak: How a Russian Search Giant Uses Consumer... by divan on Thursday August 10, 2023 @09:22AM (#37075821)
Linguistic choices aside, the nature of power acquision is very different in russia and western countries. One of the best explainers is on Kamil Galeev's twitter/substack. Highly recommended read:

https://kamilkazani.substack.com/p/avocado-economy-why-russi...

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Re:The Yandex Leak: How a Russian Search Giant Uses Consumer... by xenator on Thursday August 10, 2023 @10:14AM (#37076430)
Oligarch means businessman who have monopoly in some field. So, it is not very different from old money in Europe. Or corporations in USA.
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Re:The Yandex Leak: How a Russian Search Giant Uses Consumer... by Stephen0xFF on Thursday August 10, 2023 @11:28AM (#37077421)
That is not the definition[0]. I can see how you think it might be, but oligarchy is for governments not monopolies -- even if some cases that line is blurred.

[0] https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/oligarch

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