January 6, 2011 By James Kimer

Yuri Milner and a Free Russian Internet

Owen Matthews has an interesting article on Yuri Milner of Digital Sky Technologies – Facebook investor, former Khodorkovsky employee, and the new face of modern Russian business.   Click here to read our last posting on him.  You can also watch him hanging out and giggling with Mark Zuckerburg here.  Despite his allegedly close relations with Time magazine’s other person of the year, most observers don’t think there’s anything to be worried about yet.

The surprising thing is that the Internet oligarchs seem–so far–to leave free speech alone.

“A year ago when DST first bought into Facebook, they seemed to be buying at above-market prices, and I wrote then that this is not a commercial deal–there is something else going on here,” says Anton Nosik, Russia’s leading blogger. “But now it seems that they were right. Facebook is now valued at $50 billion, five times its price in 2009. And it’s hard to argue that this is about anything but the money.”