In Silicon Valley on February 19, 2014, the day after the protests broke out in Kiev, Ukrainian American WhatsApp founder Jan Koum signed a $19 billion deal to sell his company to Facebook. For Ukraine, that same $19 billion would have been the answer to its short-term bond, debt and gas bills.
…
The high-water mark for Belarus and the Internet is a social media-savvy graduate student in Massachusetts named Evgeny Morozov, who writes neo-Luddite screeds against American technology companies, advancing the official views of Russia and Belarus.
The choices we make about how we manage data will be as important as the decisions about managing land during the agricultural age and managing industry during the industrial age. We have a short window of time--just a few years, I think--before a set of norms set in that will be nearly impossible …