> The watchdog, Roscomnadzor, said Russia would consider it interference in its sovereign affairs and a hostile influence should Google fails to respond to the

> The watchdog, Roscomnadzor, said Russia would consider it interference in its sovereign affairs and a hostile influence should Google fails to respond to the request. Given how the Russians are obviously meddling in elections around the world using hacking and disinformation campaigns, I don't think they really have any leg to stand on here. Their acceptance of flagrantly violating laws in other countries means that really the US, through Google, should be trying to meddle inside Russia to advocate for opposition parties and Democratic/civil society institutions. If the West could effectively organize mass anti-Putin protests and scare him, it seems beneficial in a world where his meddling has gone relatively unanswered except for sanctions. Especially if our answer was "we" will focus on disseminating accurate information and supporting free speech, countering both authoritarianism and disinformation campaigns, it would become a brighter line of differing world philosophies and give some moral foundation in its connection to Western liberalism. It would be meddling through its support of individual rights, free expression, freedom to assemble, supporting free elections. It's similar to giving political asylum to persecuted opposition leaders who stand for liberalism and democracy and then amplifying their message from exile. We should enshrine this support of such rights into some NGOs and international treaties (many of which we already have) that Democratic societies could sign and then multinational corporations would have a standard of international law to follow. Then instead of corporations having to choose which laws to follow, they would have more clarity through following international law. And obviously there is a massive slippery slope in everything I just proposed. It's like how the Bretton Woods Conference after WWII established the World Bank and the IMF to push a western global paradigm for how we think economic development, which entrenched a markets based system over a communist system. I think developing some new organizations / treaties that then help align how all these multinationals and Western governments work together in an era of the internet to push for certain rights, would be a net positive, while fraught proposition. Right now massive amounts of power are being consolidated into a handful of internet companies, and that power is being manipulated to sow discord and disinformation to the benefit mostly of authoritarian regimes. We could way more effectively use this power to fight those regimes and begin to play offense instead of only defense.