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Google’s engineers will be out of Russia in no time. The global tech company confirmed its intention to move its tech experts from the company’s offices in the country. Google has preserved engineering operations in Russia since 2006.
However, the tech giant said this does not mean it will let go of the Russian users who browse the popular search engine and mentioned this is not the first time in its history when it pulls out its specialists out of a state. The company declined to disclose how many employees will be affected by this change.
According to some sources, Google employs about 100 tech programmers in Russia. Google will provide this workforce with employment offers in other states. Even if the engineers will be out of Russia, Google plans to maintain marketing, customer support and sales teams in Russia.
A few months earlier, in July, the Russian legislature passed law mandating web organizations to store nationals’ personal information inside the nation. Kremlin has said the enactment is intended to improve data security. Some have seen this as an endeavor to censor web access as the law would give the legislature the right to close websites that decline to go along with new regulations.
Numerous tech organizations store client data in gigantic information storerooms in multiple places worldwide and don’t connect the place of the storerooms with the origin of users’ data.
This step is similar with the company’s actions in 2011 in China. At the time, China’s controls of search engines turned into a big issue for Google. Since 2013 Russia required Google to take off about 300 the search results.
As with China, the one who advocated for the move out of Russia was Sergey Brin, one of Google’s co-founders. Brin has Russian origins, his parents leaving this state due to the hostility against their Semitic origins and moving to U.S. The official’s childhood memories combined with CEO Larry Page’s eager new ventures, makes them both huge supporters of free discourse and low government restriction.
Google’s official statements do not clearly state the reason why it decided to move the team out of the country. As a result, some believe it is hard to say if the pull back is a reaction to Russia’s new policies restricting web freedom or if Google was directly pressured to get out of the country.
The news about the ‘Russian retreat’ arrived the same day Google publicly declared it will shut down a new service in Spain. This is viewed by some as proof of Google’s Achilles’ heel – the national legal and political pressures.
