Last year Facebook got some new faces—faces that everyone on the ubiquitous social network should know about because their influence on it has been growing.
One is the face of Yuri Milner, a Russian with an M.B.A. from the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School. Milner’s company, Digital Sky Technologies, owns a share in Facebook that started with a purchase of 1.96 percent last year and is now variously estimated at 5 to 10 percent.
Milner, a university-trained physicist, has a stellar talent for managing social cybernetworks—so much talent that the Kremlin has put him on a commission for the “Modernization and Technological Development of Russia’s Economy.” Some reports say he also has a mandate from the bosses in Moscow to help make “illegal” Web content go away.
Milner is the face of DST best known in the U.S., but the company has an investor who fits, rather more than Milner, the stereotype of the Russian oligarch. He is billionaire industrialist Alisher Usmanov, known for his connection with the British Arsenal soccer team. Usmanov, the Russian newspaper Kommersant has reported, owns a 32 percent stake in DST (he also owns Kommersant, which he is said to have bought with “encouragement” from the Kremlin).
Usmanov’s past is shadowed by ambiguities. Before he was 30, he was convicted of extortion in his native Uzbekistan; later his record was cleared, but after former British ambassador to Uzbekistan Craig Murray said he had indeed been a racketeer and not a political prisoner as he claimed, Usmanov dealt with all the blogs that reported Murray’s statement in a heavyhanded way that should be unacceptable to supporters of an open Internet. And years afterward, when Usmanov bought the cell phone company Megafon, a shareholder who didn’t want to sell his interest disappeared from his vacation house in Latvia under mysterious circumstances.
DST is also in the process of buying the ICQ messaging service from AOL. American law enforcement officials worry that if the ICQ server moves from its present location in Israel to Russia, it might become very difficult to monitor the activities of cybercriminals, many of whom are said to use ICQ. The deal could be stopped by the Committee on Foreign Investment in the U.S. (the committee that would have let Dubai Ports World own U.S. port operations), but the committee has taken no such action.
