Some analysts have suggested that the government believes YouTube is too popular to block without risking a political pushback or increasing the popularity of VPNs. But others argue that the Google exemption is related to the company’s trump card, which is in the pockets of about 75 percent of Russians. “Most smartphones in Russia are Android [which runs on Google’s operating system], not Apple, because they are cheaper,” said Sergey Sanovich, a research associate at Princeton University. “It’s technically much more difficult to censor mobile data and applications as opposed to websites.”
Blocking some Google services without affecting others can also be difficult, says Karen Kazaryan, director and founder of the Moscow-based Internet Research Institute. “Google’s cloud infrastructure is a very complex business,” Kazaryan said. “If you try to block something, you can accidentally block something that has nothing to do with each other and then a critical service just stops working.”
The Russian invasion of Ukraine has only exacerbated the problems Google’s subsidiary in the country was already dealing with. Over the years, the Moscow office has struggled with increasingly strict laws regarding the Internet and a steady stream of fines, ranging from $11,000 to $100 million, for its refusal to remove content. Google told WIRED that there will be no change to YouTube’s content moderation policy linked to the bankruptcy filing.
It is also not the first time that Google has closed an office in Moscow. In 2014, it moved its engineers out of town to protest new data protection rules. But the stakes have risen in recent years. In September 2021, Russian authorities visited the home of one of Google’s top executives and told her to remove an app linked to activist Alexei Navalny from the Google Play Store or go to jail. When Google moved the director into a hotel under a different name, the same agents came to her room to tell her the clock was still ticking, according to the report. Washington Post, which the executive branch did not mention. The app was removed within hours.
Kazaryan thinks part of the reason Google has persisted in Russia, despite so many challenges, is that its co-founder is Russian. “I think it’s a bit sentimental because of Sergey Brin,” he says. Brin, who lived in the Soviet Union until he was 5 years old, has previously spoken of how his experience growing up in a political system that censored speech shaped Google’s policies: “It certainly shaped my views, and some of my company’s views,” he told The New York Times in 2010.
The company’s Russian subsidiary also made billions of dollars in revenue. In an earnings call, Google said 1 percent of its global revenues in 2021 came from Russia, up from 0.5 percent the year before, which would equate to $2.5 billion — the same amount it earned from the UK in 2020. expects those revenues to grow, said Dan Ives, an analyst at Wedbush. “Google went down the same path as Microsoft, where there was a lot of hope that they could expand in Russia in the coming decades,” he says.
