In March 2015, when the Republican governor of the state of Indiana, Mike Pence, signed a so-called “religious freedom” law that would permit businesses to refuse to serve gay customers, his action provoked a fierce response from corporate leaders clustered halfway across the continent on the West Coast. The San Francisco billionaire Marc Benioff, whose Salesforce.com had paid $2.5 billion only two years earlier to buy a software company with 2,000 employees in Indianapolis, took to Twitter for his salvo: “Today we are canceling all programs that require our customers/employees to travel to Indiana to face discrimination,” he declared.

Soon Benioff joined together with 70 other top executives of technology companies—including Airbnb’s Brian Chesky, Netflix’s Reed Hastings, Microsoft’s Satya Nadella, and Cisco’s Gary Moore—to sign a statement opposing the legalization of LGBT discrimination. And Apple’s openly-gay CEO, Tim Cook, published an opinion column in the Washington Post to let people know “around the world” that “regardless of what the law might allow in Indiana…we will never tolerate discrimination.” Cook concluded: “Opposing discrimination takes courage. With the lives and dignity of so many people at stake, its time for all of us to be courageous.” Days later, Salesforce.com’s top executive in Indiana stood by the side of the legislature’s recalcitrant Republican leaders as they announced a new law clarifying that the state’s “religious freedom” act didn’t condone discrimination based on gender.

The quick, decisive victory in Indiana resonated worldwide, and the news inspired the hopes of Russian activists that America’s progressive techno-moguls would finally speak up against Vladimir Putin’s anti-gay laws. But the Silicon Valley leaders still haven’t summoned nearly enough courage for that much tougher fight.

An American sales executive traveling today to Moscow—where the state sanctions persecution and condones violence against LGBTQ people—could nonetheless patronize many of the same brands that serve him in San Francisco or Seattle or New York City, including the companies that forcefully opposed the Indiana law: He could stay at an Airbnb apartment rental in Moscow, which has emerged as one of the service’s top markets worldwide. (Airbnb has a Moscow office with several employees and owns a small Russian design firm.) The traveler could get chauffeured around town by Uber drivers, drink lattes from Starbucks, stream video on Netflix, and buy an iPhone or iPad or MacBook at a retail shop or order one directly from Apple’s Russian-language online store. (Apple has sold more than 1 million iPhones a year in Russia). He could search for sales leads and contacts and gauge customers’ attitudes in Russia using Salesforce.com’s ”social listening software.” If he was conducting business with the Russian government, he would surely encounter bureaucrats using PCs that ran on Microsoft Windows operating system and were networked by routers made by Cisco, which is under investigation by the U.S. Justice Department and Securities and Exchange Commission for allegedly masterminding a massive scheme of kickbacks and bribes to secure contracts with Russia’s government, military, and intelligence operations.