“It’s up to the creator of the technology and the user of the technology to make it good.”
— Apple CEO Tim Cook, Nov. 2017.
We now learn that Cook defers to Vladimir Putin when defining “good.” After all, Cook and Google CEO Sundar Pichai are newly deserving of Putin’s gifts. Perhaps even cases of the finest Beluga caviar and Beluga vodka.
Actually, “gift” is the wrong word. Payment is far more appropriate. Because as President Putin celebrates yet another landslide election victory on Sunday, Cook and Pichai must share in the credit.
The facts are clear. Apple and Google agreed last week to suspend a “Smart Voting” app from their app stores. Bending to the Kremlin’s authoritarian demands, Cook and Pichai thus made it far more difficult for Russians to find the candidates most likely to unseat pro-Kremlin parliamentarians. In their action, the two American CEOs have made their tech giants allies to an American adversary and active agents of his authoritarianism.
As I write this article, incoming election returns suggest that Putin’s ruling United Russia party has secured another large majority in the State Duma. But while it’s true that Putin remains popular across much of Russia (if steadily less so), the president has also benefited from some less noble electoral strategies.
In the buildup to these elections, Russian security forces engaged in a widespread crackdown on dissident voices. True opposition politicians were banned from standing in the elections. Independent media outlets were forced to list as foreign agents and had their services disrupted. Activists were harassed or detained, and thousands of protesters were beaten. And the figurehead of the Russian opposition, Alexei Navalny, narrowly escaped death after a botched FSB effort to assassinate him. The United States knows, with very high confidence, that this assassination was ordered from the top of the Russian government. While Navalny survived, he now languishes in a gulag. Whether he will ever depart that prison alive is far from clear.
This, then, was an election defined by a mixture of real support for Putin, significant oppression, and American tech giant enabling. We should now expect Cook and Pichai to extend their services to Xi Jinping. He is in need of them.
