For Google, a Risky Ploy by Turning Its Back on China | Hacker News Reader

For Google, a Risky Ploy by Turning Its Back on China

nytimes.com

17 pointsez7716 comments

> China’s biggest cellular communications company, China Mobile, was expected to cancel a deal that had placed Google’s search engine on its mobile Internet home page

> China’s second-largest mobile company, China Unicom, was said by analysts and others to have delayed or killed the imminent introduction of a cellphone based on Google’s Android platform.

> One major Internet portal, Tom.com, already had ceased using Google to power its search engine.

Now, I'm not sure of the business arrangements made, but it sounds to me that Chinese companies are repudiating contracts because of pressure by the Chinese government.

If true, this looks really bad on China for foreign investment. The government can, on a whim, cancel your contracts with Chinese companies, and steer public opinion using news agencies. Not to mention risk of your IP getting appropriated. That's not the kind of environment foreign companies like to work in.

The Chinese government is, I think, looking very childish right now.

That China can take your business assets, cancel any agreement, or even put your employees in jail, is part of the risk assumed by any company that chooses to do business there. This incident is not going to change the way business is done in China. Foreign companies just see the billions of potential customers, and will bend over backwards (and risk losing investment) to do whatever they need to get access to that potential (and human rights be damned). Even Google is not wanting to pull all of it's business out of China, so they can't really be given too much credit for what they did with just the search engine.

Isn't this how business is done in most countries? The countries have laws and if the businesses want to enter the market, they have to follow the laws of the country?

It seems like this debate is mostly irrational and hypocritical support of Google and a nationalistic anti-China sentiment.

The U.S. does exactly the same things China is doing now. They prop up GM and not honda or toyota. They bail out U.S. banks, but not HSBC. They retroactively change the laws to enable AT&T et al to violate the constitution.

Why the hypocrisy?

Why the false equivalence?

A bit like Apple with the app store, is it not?

Yes, I think so. This behaviour and uncertainty increases the cost of business when dealing with Apple's platforms. Similarly, China's practices increases the cost of doing business in the country. Both have leverage due to size of the market economy (they can get away with more than a smaller firm/country would)

This does little to discourage the Nokia's of the world, but it certainly might be a deciding factor for smaller firms.

Deals are of course going to be canceled voluntarily. If you're a mobile company why would you ship your products with a search engine that's dropping its service in your country? Not to mention the bad publicity the Google brand is now incurring in China. It's the same reason why endorsements/sponsorships/contracts are dropped when people like Tiger Woods and Kate Moss screw up. It's bad image.

No matter how risky it is, I don't know if I would call it a "ploy" to stick to one's principles. I understand the Maoris have a proverb, "Don't hang out with people who don't respect you," which seems to apply here, given the apparent PRC support for the hacking of Google's network.

The biggest winner in this whole thing is Apple.

How is Google going to compete in mobile hardware if it is unable to make deals with Chinese companies?

I don't think they fully thought through the extent to which their supply chain (and that of their partners) depends on China.

What if China takes a page from the US government's playbook and starts arbitrarily classifying software as "munitions", with Android first in the crosshairs? A simple thing that would suddenly make this "free" operating system totally uncompetitive.

Mobile partners of Google are already leery about being undercut by Google's own phones on the one hand and sued by Apple on the other. Getting the Chinese government on their bad side would absolutely be a dealbreaker.

Google used to censor Scientology and Nazi pages for U.S and German searches. Are they still doing this?

a quick search:

http://www.google.com/search?q=scientology takes you directly to the homepage of the church of scientology.

http://www.google.com/search?q=nazi 4th link is for the american nazi party.

those two subjects don't look to be censored.

http://xenu.net used to be the top hit for Scientology in google.com. It was removed after a DMCA complaint. Apparently, it is back up. Search for "google scientology" for background.

The google.de was accused of censoring holocaust-denial sites (they would appear on google.com). I don't know a high profile holocaust denial site to check it out.

Not sure about that, but they do censor child pornography. Like their practices in China, there is a note at the bottom saying that results have been censored.

Try this search: http://www.google.ca/search?q=TiP5As2jNc

As far as I can tell, the Scientology thing was due to a DMCA takedown notice by the Church of Scientology. Due to that, Google now publishes all DMCA requests here: http://chillingeffects.org/notice.cgi They also link to those DMCA requests as search results when applicable.

They don't censor results on Nazis in the US.

For a rundown of their censorship (almost always government mandated), see Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_by_Google

1, the censorship being asked by US government is less evil (or not at all, depends on your standard) 2, US market is bigger, and even if they can afford to lose the world's biggest market (no they can't), relocating headquater would be a lot more costly.

Moral has a price, it is just a lot harder to determine and even harder to admit.

There was the censoring of the autocomplete in the islam is thing too. When you're madly in love with Google, or anything for that matter, you gotta pick and choose which things to remember and which motivations to imagine, but I don't like google, so maybe that's why I can see through some of the irrationality.

I don't feel one way or the other about china, but I do believe in certain social customs that google is ignoring.

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