Apple and Google were forced to get rid of LinkedIn from their app stores in Russia this week. It appears that after the Russian government's stern demand for it to be taken down, the tech giants complied this week.
According to New York Times, the authorities ordered the removal of the business and employment social networking site, weeks after the court blocked the service for alleged disregard of local laws on internet data storage. It was added that the restriction move also serves as a penalty for not keeping data of Russian citizens just within the nation's borders, and this is against the Russian law.
"We are disappointed with Russia's telecom regulatory agency Roskomnadzor's action to block LinkedIn," Nicole Leverich, a rep from LinkedIn told Recode. "It denies access to our members in Russia and the companies that use LinkedIn to grow their businesses."
This event came just days after Apple pulled out The New York Times app from its Apple store after China requested for it. The said country also blocked the news app in China's Apple Store prior to the petition.
Nonetheless, the app was eventually taken out but reports claimed that Apple did not specified what regulations that the particular app has breached. There are no clear explanations as to why China wanted it out and the only reason stated was the vagued, "violation of local regulations."
Many people were not surprised with what China did because the country is already known for imposing restrictions on big sites such as Google and Facebook. For China, these sites posed big security risk to the country's national security.
Aside from this, the local authorities also believe that both Facebook and Google are sources of wrong data. Thus, to protect their citizens from misinformation, it banned the sites in the country. Finally, Time reported that the Chinese government also blocked the Wall Street Journal and Wikipedia since 2014.
