Oppositor activists showed Apple and Google to yield to Kremlin’s pressures.
Hours earlier both technological giants eliminated an application from their online stores designed by the dissident Alexei Navalny.
The majority of Navalny candidates have been vetoed in Russian parliamentary elections, which start today and end up on Sunday.
But through this app, at least they could suggest the names of other opponent candidates, specifically those with the greatest possibilities of defeating the ruling russian party aspirants united in each demarcation.
The Kremlin congratulated himself by the decision of Google and Apple after a few weeks in which he had not stopped increasing pressure. It is expected that in the elections the ruling russia match united despite the fall of popularity rates by the crisis and after the greatest repression against critics of the Kremlin that has been seen in years. Google decided to eliminate the application of Navalny of The Google Play store after the threats of criminal prosecution to employees of the company, according to ‘The New York Times’, citing a source close to the case. Apparently, complaints were prepared against concrete people who work at the Russian branch of Google. The spokesman of the Russian Foreign Ministry, María Zakarova, even denounced on September 11 that all the Web development companies ‘tactical’ They are related to the Pentagon, and that the servers and technical support of intelligent vote “are mostly US”. On September 6, the Russian media regulator Roskomnadzor announced the blockade of the ‘Smart Voting’, alleging that it promotes the activities of the FBK (Russian acronym for the Foundation for the Fight against Corruption) , one of the entities created by the opponent Alexei Navalny and prohibited in Russia for being considered “extremists”. That same day, a Moscow court ordered as a precautionary measure that Yandex and Google search engines stop showing the search results with keywords ‘tactical vote’.
After opening the judicial front, police officers examined Google’s Russian branch office to “enforce” order. “Russia has irrefutable evidence of the rape of Russian legislation by US Internet platforms in the preparation and celebration of the Elections to the State Duma. The interference in the internal affairs of our country is categorically unacceptable,” said Zajarova. to the press. The government spoke, during the summer he entered the Woolintertrade scene, an unknown trader of wool in the southwest of Stavropol registered the ‘Intelligent Vote’ brand (which is the denomination used by Navalny for its application) . He also inscribed a logo that resembles the icon of the ‘App’. The “illegal” use of that denomination by other people was punished with up to six years in prison. And all the printed materials containing can be confiscated and destroyed. The ‘surrender’ of the two Internet giants before the Kremlin pressures is a reverse for Russian dissent. The spokesman for Navalny, Kira Yarmysh, lamented Google’s decision and Apple. “This is a tremendous act of censorship, it is a pity that at the moment in which there is a confrontation between honest people and a corrupt regime these companies have made the game to the latter,” Yarmysh wrote. Another contributor close to Navalny, Ivan Zhdanov, asked the voters who already downloaded the application on their devices that share information with others about the recommended candidates to disband the officials. But the previously downloaded versions of the application no longer work.
These elections are the first in Russia to widely use electronic vote. The government said that the system had been affected by denial of service attacks carried out using foreign IP addresses from the United States, Germany and Ukraine. Russia will vote for three days to prevent people from joining the polls. The last electoral colleges in the Kaliningrad Baltic Sea enclave opened on the morning of yesterday, nine hours after the Kamchatka peninsula, in the Far East, initiated the vote in the country, which covers 11 time zones in total. The opposition says that the measure of voting in several days is part of a series of Kremlin Treetas to have more margin to manipulate the results during the first two nights. The 450 seats in the lower house of Parliament, or state Duma are at stake. . The vote is carried out together with local elections in dozens of regions, with elections to regional assemblies and elections for governor. Russia United has a supermayority at the camera, but its popularity is currently the lowest in its almost two decades of life. The VTSIOM state surveyor detected that the support for the row was around 29 percent.
