I'm saying that in order to spark a debate and challenge that belief. Would anyone please list some actions taken by the US government which is similar in nature to the takeover illustrated here?
It seems very similar to what happened in the middle ages. Before the rise of the merchant class, specifically the ability to defend themselves, bullies stepped in and took what they wanted. Pg went into some detail about that in one of his essays about wealth. The phrase "if you let the nerds keep their lunch money, you rule the world" comes to mind. Might that be changing? Is Russia harming itself by taking these actions? What ways might this action backfire against them? Or is this a new model for how governments should treat corporations that dare challenge their authority?
EDIT: I really didn't mean to start a flamewar. My apologies. I was hoping to get people's thoughts on whether governments of the future are going to do this kind of thing more and more (including the US). I should have led with that rather than cheerleading America.
EDIT2: I would again like to stress the international nature of this threat. This type of governmental action is something that seems likely to eventually threaten us all, regardless of where we're located. As such, the best thing to do would be to discuss possible ways of protecting ourselves.
I would also like to apologize for accidentally insulting everyone who lives in places other than America. Phrasing my comment the way I did was a boneheaded thing to do. It currently reads like an elaborate form of trolling, as if I'm snubbing non-Americans. But in fact I'm just poor with the pen and in reality meant to debate the merits of starting companies in various countries, and to call attention to this international threat. I'm quite sorry for how it sounded. In the meantime, can anyone think of ways of protecting ourselves from centralized government action against businesses?
I've been following the Crimea conflict very closely (which almost certainly is also what caused Pavel's departure) and the seriousness of the situation is heavily underestimated by the world.
The Russian economy is heavily dependent on gas exports, and both income from - and production of gas is declining. A small elite has been massively siphoning off wealth from those natural resources and is desperate to stay in control.
Given the situation they (rightfully) fear being overthrown and to prevent that they've started 'restoring Russia to it's former glory,' appealing to traditional family values by introducing anti-gay laws, introducing laws against protesting, laws against criticising Russia, shutting down independent media and distributing propaganda from the remaining station which gets ever more removed from reality by the day.
It is in that context that the VKontakte departure must be seen, and therefore it's difficult to make direct comparisons between Russia and the US: they are truly orders of magnitude apart right now.
P.S. It is important to keep in mind that you could also argue that something similar happened in the US with the NSA scandals but in the US none of the CEOs chose to resign.
The situation geopolitically seems pretty simple, in broad strokes. Too bad there's unfounded scaremongering on both sides(or should I say 3 or 4 sides).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petrodollar_warfare
and then do more search on the internet about how USA are basically forcing everybody to buy oil in $$.
At least russia doesnt force other nations to trade gaz in rubs.
So yeah,russia is evil , but USA are even more evil.
EDIT:
downvote me all you want it's not just a conspiracy theory,that's a fact,but since we are on a pro american board, i did not expect anything else but downvotes.
There is a reason why USA invaded Irak or Libya,and it had nothing to do with promoting democracry.
It was about the fear of USA seeing Iraki and Libyan leaders trade their oil in something else than dollars.
And when the world revolts against this made up,military backed dollar domination, USA will fail hard. Because the dollar is backed by nothing but fear.
America is no. 14 on the list of best countries to start a business in. http://www.forbes.com/best-countries-for-business/list/
If you're a small business owner that owns 100%, you really own 47%. You're a minority shareholder in your own company.
Killing Lavabit for instance?
To understand how dumb that is, consider that AOL(!) runs a popular messaging service on which thousands of people exchange secure messages using OTR-enabled clients, and AOL could not be "killed" the way Lavabit was: the DOJ can't coerce AOL into betraying OTR-protected users, because AOL simply doesn't have that ability.
The reason Lavabit did have that ability is that getting users to install software is inconvenient and drastically harms adoption. Lavabit took a shortcut, and their users shared the resulting pain.
If you review the list of countries preceding the US on the Forbes list posted upthread, you won't find too many that wouldn't have left Lavabit similarly exposed.
He also owns a stake in Odnoklassniki, another Russian social media site, which is "for classmates and old friends", a bit like Friends Reunited:
Usmanov owns shares in a lot of Silicon Valley companies.[1] Mail.ru's former chairman, Yuri Milner, funded the automatic Y Combinator investments from 2011-2013.[2]
1: http://www.usm-group.com/internet.html
Facebook, Apple, Twitter, Groupon, Zynga, Spotify, Zalando, ZocDoc, Airbnb, Alibaba and 360buy.
2: http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/12/16/us-venture-milner-...
More information: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VK_(social_network)
[VK] is 8th most popular social networking site in the world
http://www.ebizmba.com/articles/social-networking-websites
[This list itself may be open to question, however. See for example some major exclusions:
http://www.businessinsider.com/a-quick-guide-to-chinas-socia...]
And the rest still seem to trust it.
Durov and others just exchanged their shares to cash, that's all.
Trying to mention this together with the fact that Durov disobeyed traffic cop order and hit him with his car (he did, that's a proven case, there is a video), doesn't make it a "Kremlin forceful takeover of VK"
"It essentially means that there's a glass ceiling to how big you can grow your company, and how influential your company can be in the Russian internet space before the government begins to take interest in it,"
http://www.theverge.com/2014/1/31/5363990/how-putins-cronies...
Isn't this how it's always been in Russia?
Right?
If anything, this CEO departure only shows that HN got the motivation for Telegram completely wrong. The assumption behind that gang up was that Telegram was trying to sabotage online privacy, because what else a Facebook-like entity may be doing in the domain of secure communications. Guess what? There was more to the picture than met the eye.
