What should these companies responses be? And why should the kazach goverment care? They'd prefer if the poeple used russian (or kazach) copy cats like vkontakte anyway.
The government preference isn't important, citizen preference is.
As to what they can do... it's a range from info to painful, but they can choose a range of options from serving up interstitials in a localized language that explains the issues, problems, and privacy and security implications... all the way to deny service.
If the citizens demand access to those services, or find it offensive that their privacy and security is being violated and circumvented, they will take action.
And these companies can help orchestrate, just as we did with SOPA/PIPA.
> If the citizens demand access to those services, or find it offensive that their privacy and security is being violated and circumvented, they will take action.
Hah, right. They'll just file a complaint to their ombudsman and the Congress will take care of it.
No, this is Kazakhstan, not California. If citizens band up and demand something that the government is against, the police will crack down on their homes, arrest 15,000 people at random out of which only 10,000 or so will return to their homes (not necessarily alive), and the remaining 5,000 will rot in jail for high treason. And if they keep getting wise ideas, they'll send in the army.
Simple. Immediately implement certificate pinning so that rogue CA's can't be used to MitM their application traffic. That should have happened long ago for these apps anyway. This will break those apps and the government, in the face of everything breaking for their citizens might re-think their plan and at a minimum, turn of TLS middling for the impacted domains.
