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Comment by jbellis | Hacker News Reader

The last paragraph says a lot between the lines. "Please don't put our employees in jail."

I still remember globalization training back at Microsoft. The short version was, "Take this stuff seriously. A few years ago, somebody left the string Taiwan in a product and China detained & questioned a bunch of unrelated employees who just happened to be in-country." Of course, the world was a different place ~2002.

http://bit.ly/b5ocjf

That link resolves to: http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2004/aug/19/microsoft.b...

I'm somewhat disturbed by the proliferation of short links outside their original motivating uses, like print and social messaging. As it is, bit.ly does various sorts of tracking, but in general, short links add a variable to the chain and and increase the susceptibility of breakage over time; or worse, changing in a bait and switch move.

Despite my prior work affiliation, no evil was intended --- I stand corrected :-)

They really should offer to relocate them to the US

Unless Google has closer ties to the government than I was aware of, they don't necessarily have that power.

It's relatively easy for a company to relocate employees, as long as it has a reasonable need for specifically those people. If it wants skilled employees with a native-level knowledge of the language and culture, it wouldn't be hard to relocate them. Having said that, it's entirely possible that those employees don't want to be relocated. If my company's relations soured in my country, I'd rather quit and find a new job then leave for the company.

Re relocating to the US, specifically: I've been through the H-1B visa process - I have the visa, but I never actually jumped. Quite apart from times when it's oversubscribed and becomes a lottery, there are any number of small hurdles you could fail on.

But if it's relocation to anywhere not-China, then yes, that ought not to be too difficult.

There are visas other than H-1B.

And, Google just needs to get the people out of Mainland China. If their safety is in danger for actions that they had no control over, I'm sure some country will give them asylum.

Or maybe China realizes that it lost, and will model the rest of the country after Hong Kong. (Remember, Hong Kong is technically mainland China.)

That would have interesting implications. If Google relocated a large number of employees someplace with a pleasant immigration process, I mean.

I've been through the same process, and all those hurdles are extremely easy to avoid and/or overcome if a company has a decent set of lawyers who deal with this thing. That kind of resource is easily within Google's reach, especially judging by the number of other companies who have legal departments dedicated to the process.

Of course the other possibility is they are with Google on this and are willing to face it out if needed.

Sure just make sure they don't have the words, gambling, DRM, downloading, torrent, drugs, porn etc in the code and they won't be detained in the US.

My first thought was that they were trying to protect their employees from the Chinese people, a subset of whom seem quite keen on starting nationalistic internet lynch mobs. Obviously the government is pretty dangerous as well, but I thought it was interesting that they weren't the first thing that sprang to mind.

Google doesn't have to make this statement. I believe no one will be put in jail because of Google's leaving. And it's not a BIG issue as you think.

The Chinese people cares house, education and health care more. Most of them don't use Google at all.

Most of them don't use Google at all.

Google's chinese marketshare disagrees with you: http://gs.statcounter.com/press

I mean the people. You might know 3/4 of Chinese people are farmers. Most of them are poorly educated. They usually work hard for a living and don't use google's services at all. You won't hear the voice from them. But they are the majority of China.

The farmers aren't the guys putting people in jail for disobeying censorship rules.

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