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Comment by rscott | Hacker News Reader

I would never have found this and appreciate you posting it.

Fascinating, though I hope history will disagree with the message of this piece.

I'm not sure history should disagree with it. The underlying message is that corporations shouldn't be playing politics, and that's an increasingly popular public sentiment in the USA as well (or the internet amplifies it).

How is Google trying to manipulate foreign government different from the health industry lobbying for their own interests?

No company should be forced to do something it's executives and employees find morally wrong. They are not actively trying to usurp the Chinese government and I don't see anyone claiming Google is bribing people and push for self serving laws in Beijing.

Lobbying can be ok if it's done in a fair and open matter. Which it is not. Lets not forget that corporations have employees and those employees are often better off when their corporation has an easier time doing business.

While I agree in general with what you're saying I don't think most of it applies to Google's situation.

- Google was never forced to do anything. They chose to. The cost of doing business in any location is abiding by any number of laws that businesses must evaluate to see if they're willing or profitably able to operate within.

- They didn't seem to have many moral problems for the first 4 years.

- They very publicly announced they had a problem with the situation and tried to force the Chinese governments hand with an ultimatum - change the laws or lose Google's business.

Perhaps they did have moral problems, but decided that providing some access to the internet's vast amount of information to Chinese users was better than providing none. It's the reform-from-within approach. Perhaps they hoped the situation would improve with time, and then it didn't, or there was indication it was not going to in the foreseeable future.

I don't have any more evidence for those motives than you do for the ones you presented.

I really hate that argument. It's not like the internet stops existing or has no value or information if you can't use Google to find stuff. Even in China - Baidu has existed since 2000, and Google had enough confidence in what Baidu was doing to buy 2.6% of their shares a year before they decided to tackle the Chinese market themselves.

All they were ever bringing to China was the opportunity for themselves to make money. Just like any business anywhere.

Except for the fact that google was allowed to get away less censoring than the other search engines as well as making it obvious that filtering was going on. Google provided a service in china while making that money and improved the freedoms of Chinese citizens with the above mentioned tools.

I'm proud that google is not above turning away from money on moral grounds. And whether you buy the Press Releases or not they seem to have had plenty of moral reasons for the withdrawal.

They didn't turn away from taking money on moral grounds. In fact, they censored results for 4 years until now. Why now do you think, after 4 years they are changing their stance?

Did it take them four years to come to their senses? Why now?

I outlined a possible reason above. I don't know if it is true, but you haven't seemed to acknowledge that it may be true.

It may be true. I wonder though, if google had 75% of the market share in china search, would this be happening right now?

"Except for the fact that google was allowed to get away less censoring than the other search engines"

No, they were and remain subject to the same laws and policies the PRC decides. That's why they're leaving.

The internet would be significantly less valuable to me if I couldn't use Google.

Why? There's other search engines, other maps, other email providers, other blog platforms, other analytics systems, other instant messengers, other social networks, other rss readers etc.

All that would happens is you'd replace whatever you use with something else, just like every other time something online stops being available.

There were definitely no search engines as good as Google pre-Google.

Sure, in 1998. This is 2010 though, there are alternatives especially in China where Google's never even had majority market share.

Even outside of China there are alternatives even if we laugh at their efforts - at this point if you hid Bing behind Google's interface people probably wouldn't even notice the difference most of the time. DuckDuckGo's made by a single guy and seems to be widely applauded.

The biggest argument against some competitors is how familiar we are with Google rather than actual inferiority.

Have you used the internet from within China?

Baidu cannot compete internationally on the strength of their technology. The quality of their results is sub-par, and subject to gaming if you have enough money to pay them. Their market share is as big as it is because of the fact that Baidu is essentially the Chinese Pirate Bay.

Feats somewhat more difficult to reproduce when competing on a level playing field where promoting, aiding and abetting piracy is somewhat frowned upon.

Who would want to compete with the deck stacked against you like that? Sure, China's market may be big enough to mask such deficiencies, blinded as everyone is by that 1 billion+ number, but its a net loss, long term, losing access to a quality competitor.

"Google was never forced to do anything."

Lol wut. You need to think about what you're saying. Go "not doing anything" they would be serving up whatever content their algorithm deems relevant.

Its 'censoring' that is doing something, and they simply chose not to do it.

They made a deliberate and conscious decision to move into the Chinese market, with full awareness of the laws and regulations they would be bound to.

- They didn't seem to have many moral problems for the first 4 years.

The reason Google didn't have a problem for the first 4 years, is because for the first 4 years it wasn't clear who was going to win the search engine war in China. Now it is clear, the winner is Baidu.

Google is leaving China because they have clearly lost in China and rather than take second place, they are inventing a principled stand and forcing China to kick them out.

Baidu has 3/4 of the search market in China and it's growing.[1] Rather than Google search traffic hitting zero, they're leaving in a political charade. What better excuse for losing to Baidu?

[1] http://brainstormtech.blogs.fortune.cnn.com/2009/12/28/googl...

30% of a market the size of China doesn't seem like loosing. Companies survive off of much less, 1% of the market is often plenty enough.

Except they have barely half that percentage and it's declining.

The problem is dealing with a socialist country you never really own what you have made. They can come in anytime and take away your manufacturing plant, confiscate your physical goods, or block your website. It always happens without fail.

Google has 1/3rd of the Chinese market, which it got after Baidu was entrenched. That is pretty much what MS and Yahoo have collectively (IIRC) in the rest of the world, but nobody says they don't factor. Google is very much aware of them, as Baidu is of Google in China.

I'd like to see a source for that claim, because the source I provided above says google has 17% or so.

> The underlying message is that corporations shouldn't be playing politics, and that's an increasingly popular public sentiment in the USA as well (or the internet amplifies it).

It all depends on what kind of politics are being played. Plenty of people in the U.S. supported divestment from South Africa because of apartheid, and would probably still do so if it still existed.

Yes, and unfortunately most in the U.S. don't know the real effects of the South Africa divestment. Here's what happened:

Coke, IBM, etc had to get out. They couldn't own the parts of their companies in SA. So they created new entities and sold them off, or just renamed them, took away the branding rights and sold their shares. The share values took a dive and people that couldn't afford such losses sold. Those that could afford to hold for 10 years bought up all the shares. Keep in mind, you could still buy a coke, it just wasn't branded as coke anymore, the companies still were open for business so much as they could without support from the U.S. entity.

When SA was allowed to take in U.S. investments again, Coke, IBM, etc bought back those entities. Some of the deals were a guaranteed buy back from the initial divestiture. So guess who reaped the rewards, who had the deep pockets to buy up all the shares? Yep, the old-moneyed white guys that the divestiture was supposed to hurt.

Speaking of Coke, you can still buy Coca-Cola in Cuba despite there being a trade embargo for decades between the US and Cuba. I remember watching a news report where they mentioned this once. Coke somehow uses loopholes to export it from the Canadian subsidiary which doesn't need to comply with US regulations.

Did everyone forget that China tried to break into their network?

Most corporations don't want to be involved in the politics game. However, as MS found out if you aren't involved you quickly become a target of opportunity.

It's a free world for the Chinese gov't if they'd like to do business with companies like Google they'll have to offer a mutually beneficial arrangement.

Well, for one, lobbying is legal. Why Google isn't lobbying the Chinese government to change its censorship laws is my question. Instead, they are putting people in harm's way and tarnishing the relationship between east and west.

What really are they going to accomplish? What are they trying to accomplish?

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