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rfmcdonaldThe former Soviet Union's VK is an enduring social network, a Facebook clone that I noted in December 2009 and September 2010 and September 2011 seemed to be well-ensconced in its particular sphere.
Back in May 2013, though, I'd heard that its founder Pavel Durov was finding himself in trouble with the Russian state. As a report in The Moscow Times explained, Durov has left his country.
Reports suggest that he left over demands from the Russian state that he open up VK's servers to them, so as to expose the messages of Ukrainian protesters to them.
As noted in Techcrunch, he wants to develop other platforms outside of Russia, perhaps those linked to his Telegram secure private messaging app.
Groups in Estonia and Lithuania have already put their countries forward as potential hosts for Durov and his team. Meanwhile, I can't help but think that VK's presence in Ukraine may end up being badly undermined by all this.
Back in May 2013, though, I'd heard that its founder Pavel Durov was finding himself in trouble with the Russian state. As a report in The Moscow Times explained, Durov has left his country.
Pavel Durov, the founder of Russia’s largest social networking website, fled the country on Tuesday, a day after he said he was forced out as the company’s CEO for refusing to share users’ personal data with Russian law enforcement agencies.
Durov, who created Vkontakte seven years ago, first announced his intention to leave the company on April 1 but withdrew his resignation letter two days later. On Monday, he announced that he had been fired and that the social network would now fall under “full control” of Kremlin-linked Rosneft CEO Igor Sechin and Vkontakte billionaire shareholder Alisher Usmanov.
[. . .]
Last week, Durov said in an interview with the New Times that the Federal Security Service had turned up the pressure on Vkontakte employees dramatically in recent months, demanding that Durov release personal information about Euromaidan activists. He said the Prosecutor General's Office ordered him to shut down a group on the website dedicated to anti-corruption activist Alexei Navalny, though he refused to do so.
“I am out of Russia and have no plans to go back,” Durov said Tuesday in an interview with Techcrunch, a news website focused on technology. He said he intended to launch a mobile social network outside Russia.
“Unfortunately, the country is incompatible with Internet business at the moment,” he said, adding that Russian authorities had targeted him after he publicly refused to cooperate with them.
Reports suggest that he left over demands from the Russian state that he open up VK's servers to them, so as to expose the messages of Ukrainian protesters to them.
Vkontake founder Pavel Durov has been fired as the social network's CEO, the company said, while Durov added that the move puts the network under the "full control" of Kremlin insiders.
Durov, who said he had resisted months of increasing pressure from the Federal Security Service, or FSB, to release personal information about opposition activists who use Russia's most popular social network, said he that learned about his dismissal from media reports.
"It is interesting that shareholders did not have the courage to do it directly," he said on his Vkontakte page on Monday night.
Vkontakte said in a statement a few hours earlier that it had acted on a resignation letter that Durov submitted on March 21 and supposedly failed to properly withdraw before a one-month deadline had expired, Interfax reported.
As noted in Techcrunch, he wants to develop other platforms outside of Russia, perhaps those linked to his Telegram secure private messaging app.
In the wake of several political conflicts both domestically and in neighboring countries like Ukraine, VK.com has become a platform for people to rally support for positions, often in defiance of the Kremlin and Russia’s leader Vladimir Putin.
Durov has been resistant to those who have tried to restrict freedom of expression on the platform, and he believes that this is at the heart of the leadership fight, as he told us a month ago, and then re-confirmed in more statements on VK.com last week. You have to wonder how and if the odd appearance by Edward Snowden on Russian TV, on the subject of government surveillance online, sits in relation to all of this.
Even beyond all of that murkiness, the situation is messy. Shareholders have been playing up publicly the role of other issues as spurs for leadership change at VK.com.
There are questions, for example, about where VK.com sits in terms of its wider business — it’s the subject of ongoing negotiations, suits and threats of suits about copyright infringement because VK.com is also a very popular platform for streaming and exchanging media.
And there are Durov’s wider interests, specifically around his Telegram app. Telegram had a surge of interest in the last couple of months because of a perfect storm of sorts: Facebook’s acquisition of WhatsApp has seen some turn away from the popular messaging app and look around for alternatives; and in general the public has started to become a lot more interested in apps offering “secure” services that do a better job of keeping their data away from commercial and government data gatherers. One of VK.com’s shareholders, United Capital Partners, has criticised Durov’s focus on Telegram at the expense of his attention on VK.com.
Groups in Estonia and Lithuania have already put their countries forward as potential hosts for Durov and his team. Meanwhile, I can't help but think that VK's presence in Ukraine may end up being badly undermined by all this.
