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).
After the US followed his advice Navalny even tweeted that he was packing his bags for jail because "someone was going to have to pay for [those sanctions]".
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/
For a startup, there are significantly more important factors to consider than the corporate tax rate, not least because most startups are managed to avoid taxable profits for the first several years of their existence (sometimes all the way up until IPO). For instance:
* The US offers at-will employment. Ireland, at the top of the list, has an Unfair Dismissal act that allows employees with a year of tenure to file claims not only if they're dismissed, but if they're "constructively" dismissed --- that is to say, if their role in the company is substantially altered in a way that allows them to claim that they're being "managed out" of the company. Constructive dismissal is a standard market clause for executives and acquirees in the US, but is certainly not a day-to-day feature of employment law.
* The World Bank Ease-of-doing-business index dings Ireland, putting them far below the US, for (among other things) the difficulty of enforcing contracts in Ireland; my tea-leaf-reading from the index's abstracted data is that you have a good certainty of enforcing a contract base in Ireland, but that the process is more time-consuming and expensive than in the US, which is ranked 50 places higher than Ireland (at #11 overall).
* Similarly, the World Bank dings Denmark (putting them 2 places below the US overall) because (among other things) it's significantly more difficult to incorporate in Denmark than in the US (where you can do it approximately as easily as ordering a non-one-click-compatible book from Amazon). Denmark also has mandatory severance of up to 6 months wages depending on tenure. 6 months wages isn't a big deal to any big company, but for a startup, it could change the calculus of when the company will need to shutter during a downswing to meet its legal obligations to employees; in the US, so long as you can make good on any current wages owed employees, you can run up until the last minute.
* Sweden, which Forbes ranks higher than the US, has intricate employment law rules that require not only a legally defensible just cause for termination, but also a good faith effort on the part of an employer to find another job for an employee even if just cause exists to fire them. Sweden also allows shareholders to personally sue directors in a variety of situations. There is no way Forbes actually believes Sweden is a better place to start a company than the US.
Here is a combination of factors that makes the US a good place to start a business:
* Extremely well-tested corporation law that makes the formation of a company, distribution of equity, resolution of disputes, and enforcement of ownership relatively predictable.
* Virtually no government interference with the formation of companies themselves, so that you could practically form a new LLC for every individual Github project you started, pay less for that than you would for hosting costs, and stand a very good chance of having those LLCs defend your interests in disputes.
* Multiple classes of corporation, convertible between each other, with some optimized for "click a button on a web page and create an LLC for my Github project", and others, not that much more expensive, that allow for multiple classes of shareholder, with the laws for those corporate forms predictable enough that hundreds of thousands of dollars of venture funding have become a standardized packaged product for promising startups (this is mind-boggling when you look at the societal infrastructure that enables it).
* A system of at-will employment that (for the most part) makes employment of workers almost risk free, so long as you don't play fast and loose with owed salary or tax withholdings.
* A tax system that is reasonably simple, not disastrously onerous, and in many ways optimized for entrepreneurs (for instance, the differing taxation schemes offered for salary versus distributions, or the ease of deducting business expenses).
* Extremely well-tested employment law that, among other things, makes it straightforward to retain 1099 contractors for one-off projects without risking their conversion into full-time employees with severance rights.
* One of the world's largest single borderless markets, such that you can start a company in Oregon and, with almost total certainty, be able to straightforwardly collect money for services (other than direct financial services, insurance, pharmaceuticals, and agriculture) from people in Florida.
* The host of the world's largest equities markets, so that investors in startups can plow money into companies knowing that if that company is the 1 in 20 that is going to go public, the most lucrative place for it to go public is the country of its origin.
The US is probably not the best place in the world to start a company. Forbes and the World Bank agree that Hong Kong and New Zealand are better. But running a company in New Zealand also requires you to domicile in New Zealand, which can complicate hiring, marketing, and (if you sell anything physical) channel delivery.
If we had single-payer health coverage, I think we'd be the best country to do business in.
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.
