Of course, I get that. But it's always companies like Apple that make so much noise about social justice who don't stick to their guns when China's involved.
Or would you rather have them not "make so much noise" about social justice?
Furthermore, don't let Chinese companies trade on US exchanges if they participate in human rights abuses.
Everyone knows what the Chinese government is doing strategically with leveraging access to their markets in exchange for control and forced tech transfer. Other countries are well within their moral rights to insist upon a quid pro quo... or else do the same to Chinese companies (who are just starting to reach scales where international expansion is as important to them as domestic).
If Apple isn't in China, that doesn't mean that nobody will be able to sell iPhones in China. That just means that Apple won't be selling iPhones in China. But someone, somewhere will still be importing iPhones into China, and people will buy them, and people will associate the resulting product experience with Apple. Those people will then blog about that experience, putting their perceptions on the world stage, where people in other countries' perceptions of the product can be affected by that conversation.
Which means that, if Apple has no Chinese app-store, then people in America will end up thinking worse of Apple. The American zeitgeist will be touched by Chinese-Americans who read Chinese-language blogs written by people living in China, where the experience of having an iPhone will suck because Apple "doesn't support China."
And it's not really moral high ground if you're taking it through no cost to yourself.
Apple has shown the willingness to compromise to access the Chinese market, so there's absolutely no reason to believe that they wouldn't or haven't bow to their other demands, including the weakening of their device security.
If I were Chinese I'd be feeling pretty damn patronized if someone told me they were taking my iPhone away and I should be happy about it.
No. You just have to reform your government or leave your country, then you can have it back. I know that this isn't likely, but putting more pressure on the CCP is exactly what Apple could be doing here.
(Edit: The sibling comment thread already goes into detail on this idea.)
"As we have stated before, Apple has never worked with any government agency from any country to create a backdoor in any of our products or services. We have also never allowed access to our servers. And we never will. It’s something we feel very strongly about."
https://www.apple.com/cn/your-location-privacy/#english
It is perhaps notable that Apple is not trying to hide or deny this removal of VPN apps (not that they could really do that effectively). As long as Apple is open about its policies, then we have our clear dividing line (and it would be unreasonable to expect Apple to think of every conceivable future technological/policy question in advance).
Still, this is assuming that we can trust Apple to admit its policies, and moreover to consistently follow them, which even governments seem to have trouble doing. It would be nice to instead have technological ecosystems where end users and citizens didn't have to trust the policies and promises of powerful organisations.
Is there any reason for them to not automatically generalize this to "...with any entity from any country"? I'm wondering about a case where a government agency hides behind some other veil and makes Apple insert some backdoor.
Either you are successful, and then the rules are changed to disadvantage you further. Or you're unsuccessful because of the rules. Lose / lose.
They already demonstrated they cannot compete without help from the government. It's an inferior product that can only succeed because the better competitors are banned. Kind of like iPhone default browser.
Also I'm pretty that Google isn't a nobody in "The East", The East is much more than just mainland China.
[1] https://www.slideshare.net/anksiitk/googles-negotiations-wit...
The two companies are very different.
Apple is not aspirational in China today: they are already making a lot of money there. Leaving China would cause an immediate shock to its stock price as well as a huge cut in actual profits.
I was an engineer on Google's web search indexing system for 4 years (including the Aurora attack), leaving shortly before Google's China exit. I listened to several talks by the head of Google China, who came from Baidu.
Even before the Aurora attack, as a matter of national pride, we knew the very best Google could hope for was 30% or 40% market share in China. Even France funded one or two attempts at a Francophone Google killer. I can't imagine the U.S. looking at a dominant search company based out of anywhere except North America (or perhaps the Anglophone Five Eyes) and not butting up significant nationalistic barriers.
Google was hoping to make profits, but they knew they would never be dominant. This made their exit much easier.
If Google was serious about China, they would have had a more obscure non-Google-branded name for their Chinese joint venture and would have branded their front page much differently. The reasons would take a large post, but Chinese web pages tend to be much more "busy", and Chinese language searches have a much higher percentage of "navigational searches". (If you search for [Facebook], you're almost certainly just trying to just get a link to facebook.com, and are basically using the search engine like a bookmark page.) I understand Google's need for a consistent U.I., but they really should have had a non-Google-branded U.I. that was better suited to the Chinese market.
Their phones are made many places. Lately in Taiwan and Korea.
There's an ancient Chinese story where a farmer criticizes an official who exiled himself because the government is corrupt. As the fisherman departs he sings: "when the water of the river is clean I wash my hat in the river, when the waters are dirty I wash my feet in the river". What good can the virtuous official do living out in the mountains? Instead you should adapt your participation to the conditions of the playing field.
I don't see how they could have stayed in China and not been involved in things that are truly evil. When the government phones you up and tells you to hide search results related to babies dying from diluted baby formula (yes, this happened), could you in good conscience tell one of your engineers to add that filter? How could a company like Google possibly retain good people when they have to ask them to do the bidding of such an evil government?
Google could spend eternity fighting this until the government changes (ha), or pull our and upload their value of organizing the world's information without* censorship.
In your eyes, they are more evil for not bringing their products to China, in their eyes, they are more noble for making their anti-censorship* stance loud and clear.
Apple in this case can be viewed as doing good (assuming having an iPhone and access to Apple's stuff is good for people) or as putting money over censorship values. It's all about which angle to look from.
The world isn't hurting for search engines, mail providers or luxury smartphones. Maybe Google decided that fighting the Chinese government is not the right battle and allowing direct censorship is not a value they are willing to compromise on even if it means losing access to several millions of users
*Yeah, filter bubbles exist and Google controlling search results and ads can be viewed as evil but that's a different conversation.
Here's some factors that could be a guide: What do the citizens themselves want? Is the boycott merely symbolic, or is it linked to other boycotts and pressure across a wide front, so that it is liable to have the desired outcome? Are the boycotters committed to long term pressure, publicity, and engagement with stakeholders in the other country?
Former Google engineer here. There's a subtle but significant semantic difference between "Don't be evil" (the real motto) and "Do no evil" (a confusion between the Hippocratic oath and the Google motto).
What I'm mostly interested in is how you can rationalize doing evil while not considering yourself as being evil. Is it based on the idea that you might do evil unintentionally or that you could be coerced into it? Are there other reasons for the distinction?
Do no evil = "No, we are not going to torture these prisoners of war, period."
Don't be evil = "It's OK to waterboard them a little if they deserve it. Remember, we are the good guys, we're here to help."
(See also: rationale for the My Lai Massacre. Very similar thinking, it's possible to excuse awful things when you're the hero(es) of your own (indoctrinated) narrative.)
One question: do they - Chinese people - even care? It's not exactly "good" - whatever Google could have done in such an environment - if you try to force it on an unwilling crowd.
Leave the apps in the app store and make the government make the next move.
They're fucking Apple, they can do a lot to help finally topple that mess. It's something that needs to happen in my lifetime, and I don't think it's unreasonable to expect a company who otherwise trumpets about social justice to be a part of it.
Really the big problem here are the constraints imposed on publicly traded companies, which I think do more harm than good in many cases.
So what’s Apple’s response? Close factories? That would disrupt their supply chain for years, potentially collapsing the company. All the cash in the world can’t retool and rebuild a factory overnight.
If anyone cares about this situation “for real,” you’d boycott every single Chinese made product because by owning a Chinese product, YOU are a hypocrite. You can’t expect Apple to stop selling to China if you aren’t willing to stop buying from China.
While you’re at it, stop buying from Mexico because elements of the government facilitate the execution of reporters. Don’t buy from Indonesia because they give the death penalty for minor drug offenses. Find me a country and I can find you something about which to be outraged. Even the “progressive” EU has enacted or attempted to enact laws abridging free speech. You can’t even print the word Nazi in Germany without facing potential criminal charges. As horrible as Nazis and neo-Nazis are, censoring their speech is STILL a violation of human rights. Free speech isn’t just that with which you agree, but it’s the expression of ideas – regardless of how detestable they may be. Germany sees Nazi speech as a threat to public order and perhaps they are correct, but in the same vein, China sees talk of Tiananmen or other such topics as threats to their public order. Should Google, Facebook and Apple pull outmoded Germany? Because it’s the exact same thing. We just happen to agree with censoring Nazi speech while we disagree with censoring “democracy-speech.” Both are censorship applied by a government due to a real or perceived threat to their systems.
Plenty of people here were willing to boycott US states over bathroom laws yet almost every single one of you has something you own made in China – a country with far bigger human rights issues than the hole in which one pees.
While pointing fingers at Apple, one ought to be pointing fingers at oneself as well.
That’s only one interpretation of human rights.
Similar to bullying, it doesn't work when the target can fight back. Sanction based actions just seem like bullshit to me and is actually exactly what China wants. It gives space for domestic equivalents to grow. (the trick is to having your self created monopoly not rot is to keep it in its toes)
China for better or worse is becoming (is) a global power. It's the only country that is managing efficiently at its scale so criticisms fall flat. It's great for western indignation for them to feel-good about themselves. The realization that the previous bullying is no longer working creates the same sense of desperation and grasping for relevance that trump supporters have.
I'd rather the market make the decisions. Not because they don't have failure points but because they organically create understanding through mixing of values. The non-organic too down forcing of value systems doesn't work unless one party can effectively bully the other.
Start building factories elsewhere. Help put together a similar manufacturing ecosystem in a different country. Automate their manufacture so much that it no longer matters if labor is done in China.
If Apple paid an extra 10-20% to locate factories elsewhere and started pulling out of China, it would be a gigantic hit to China while being only a 20% hit to Apple. And Apple could threaten China instead of China threatening Apple. And China wouldn't dream of making these kinds of requests again.
Apple has more leverage than they are willing to use.
But Apple/all others wouldn't.. Because 20% profit.
Driven by our own capitalist agendas, we're the ones fuelling China after all.
That line of "reasoning" makes it a self-fulfilling prophecy, then.
(It additionally feels ethically unsound to me; the "if I don't do it, someone else will, therefore it's okay" — no, it's still not okay. And that's what people are upset about.)
But Apple made it a company focus to court Chinese market. So they can't back down now. For some reason I've never really liked the Chinese government. They always come across as a benevolent dictator, they'll let you do business as long as you toe the line. Any inkling of freespeech or such ideas and you're out.
And if you make choices they have consequences. Those consequences include that people in the west will lose respect for your company, complain about it, patronize competitors, propose laws to punish it, etc.
If that puts the company in a bind, good. They're a multi-billion dollar international corporation. They have to choose between morals and profits a thousand times a day. It should be as hard as possible for them to make the immoral choice. And if they make it anyway, it should cost them something.
What I'm saying is that that's the problem and what we should be doing is devising ways to thwart that outcome instead of forgiving them just because their betrayal was expected to be profitable.
More generally, I don't think describing countries & cultures that don't share your particular values as evil is reasonable or useful.
That is still a false dichotomy. They don't necessarily have to change the policy in order to render it ineffective.
Apple is full of smart people. They could think of something if they had to.
Others in the comments have already suggested that they could allow side-loading of apps, which would remove their ability to prevent people from installing VPN apps. So the choice isn't actually "do evil or leave", it's at best "do evil or open the walled garden", which makes the choice they made far less sympathetic.
> More generally, I don't think describing countries & cultures that don't share your particular values as evil is reasonable or useful.
Prohibiting VPNs is part of a wider crackdown on free speech and privacy. If "evil" means doing wrong, that is doing wrong. "The banality of evil" and all of that.
Funny that is the _exact_ same argument that politicians have made about secure backdoors in communication software for use by "law enforcement only".
> free speech and privacy
Why is that doing wrong? The causality is based in Western humanistic moral belief. You simply should not force your morals on other cultures and countries.
The government's argument is that we have the ingenuity to land a man on the moon, therefore it should be no problem to land a man on the sun.
You're arguing that because we can't land a man on the sun, there is no way to land a man on the moon.
The reason the government uses that argument is that it's generally true. Application of resources and ingenuity solves problems. Secure encryption back doors are in the exception box next to perpetual motion machines and faster than light communication.
Subverting censorship is not. People do that all the time.
> Why is that doing wrong? The causality is based in Western humanistic moral belief.
It is doing wrong because free speech is the best known method of preventing civil war. War being right at the top of the list of the most evil things in human experience.
And we're talking about Western beliefs because we're talking about Western people demanding Western values of a Western company.
Apple itself is a long way from being the free speech crusader you are hoping for; in fact, they are clearly quite pro-censorship: just look at the App store. It's ridiculously censored! The refusals to approve the drone strike app Metadata+ and the Twitter-alternatie Gab strike me as particularly egregious. See also the section "1.1 Objectionable Content" of the app store review guidelines -- it's like stepping back in time to the worst caricature of 1950s America prudery and censorship.
This a "two wrongs don't make a right" type situation.
In fact, if the pressure from this could get them to stop doing that, all the better.
Or stated another way "there's too much money involved to worry about ethics."
Yet Google left it and they seem to be doing OK. Apple could well afford to leave it too:
https://www.cnbc.com/2017/05/02/apples-cash-hoard-swells-to-...
Apple is overly-dependent upon Chinese manufacturing to have hardware at all. Leaves them beholden to Chinese rules, whereas, if they had manufactured elsewhere, China would have to deal with demand for a needed foreign product.
Now, however, if Apple pulled out, they would leave all that manufacturing expertise behind, and would face a lack of skilled labor elsewhere that they largely caused in the first place.
So, yes, ethics and money clash yet again, as money was designed to make happen. If they didn't pay people, a lot of dirty work wouldn't happen, and a lot of goods would be unavailable as a result.
If you tweet about ethics on a computer, chances are, that computer's hardware makes you complicit.
Yes, me too...
Apple isn't dependent on the Chinese for manufacturing they are dependent on Foxconn, a Taiwanese company. And China wants Foxconn there. They greatly incentivized Foxconn to set up shop there.[1]
There's no reason Apple with its' hundreds of billions in cash reserves couldn't finance an "iPhone City" like China did in Zhengzhou and put it elsewhere.
And seeing how Foxconn is looking towards automation which isn't dependent on human labor, they could set it up an automated iPhone City anywhere, including the US.[2]
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/29/technology/apple-iphone-c...
[2] http://fortune.com/2016/12/31/foxconn-iphone-automation-goal...
No. It was way before phone manufacturing. China wanted to censor google searches but Google did not approve this so at the end they pulled out their servers from China and hosted it in Singapore.
At the same time, the fact that the West generally doesn't care about ethics shows that the West is not necessarily a good model to follow. Maybe China has a better alternative.
The CPC is engaged in a very shortsighted strategy. They're doing everything they can to hang on to untenable growth numbers. When the chickens come home to roost there is going to be real trouble the likes of which we have not seen in living memory. The wealthy in China have seen the writing on the wall for a long time and are doing everything they can to exit before it's too late.
Then how can anyone really say that they are doing business in china? When it's the government calling all the shots and taking the lion's share of profits?
What is a foreign business in china, besides a brand-on-loan-to-the-government (that they pay you for using)?
The mentioned 52% or 51% ownership is nothing but protectionism. It is nothing different from Trump asking certain US products to be made in the US.
If it's the law, it's the law. In China, it's the law to remove VPN apps. I suppose it's really not much different than the laws in the US that compel companies to give the government access to my information if they request such access. It's just the law, it's not really Facebook and Google trying to screw me.
All that said, I think what most posters are advocating is maybe for Apple to just leave China.
And, of course, that's where the other shoe drops...
with the question of fiduciary duties.
So yeah... I see your point... because of the legal issues involved, privacy and access can be tough problems. Not just in China or the US, but elsewhere in the world as well.
*EDITS for grammar
It is very different. Censorship with the main objective of keeping an unelected regime in power by suppressing free speech is not the same as any problematic side-effects of fighting crime and terrorism. Granted, there are some grey areas such as oppression of sexual minorities, but the distinction between political oppression and crime fighting should not be lost completely.
The least Apple could do is allow sideloading of apps.
No, in US the directive comes from court and even then the companies can deny the information if it is encrypted (e.g. like Apple did in San Bernardino).
I also do not understand the nonsensical argument everyday that if US does small x then it allows other countries to do big X along with big Y. What kind of logic is this?
They can only argue against a specific request it and appeal a ruling or an order.
As for the San Bernadino case it's not correct.
Apple has complied with the court order, they gave the FBI access to the iCloud Account. What they didn't do is to decrypt the phone but they were also not ordered too by the court.
If the court would have ordered them to develop a way to decrypt the device and they've lost all appeals they would've complied with that too.
[1] http://www.markedbyteachers.com/as-and-a-level/classics/anti...
There are bad laws, and then there are bad actors refusing to disobey bad laws, which is a quintessential civic obligation in the western tradition.
But of course, you could also just be a silent dictatorship supporter (seems like a natural view for a CEO) and hope that blind loyal fans & employees find good apologys for betrayal of core-western values.
And you dont get to pin this on cultural differences. Europe had 2000 years of kings, monarchs and other vermin- and after 2 WorldWars everybody basically had given up on democracy rooting anywhere there (maybe in britain). Its just european culture, to crawl under stomping boots. They need that!
Today, we got 60 years of peace and prosperity, with democracy and alot of freedom. So no- the partyline of ineveitability of itself, does not convince. Though im absolutly against violent unrest or violent transitions. I rather have china another 100 years under party rule, then supporting a violent uprising.
for some niche market, maybe not.
ELI5:
* How does the "decide" process and "approval" process work?
* Who is the decider? (What are their qualifications/bkgrd? (Are they ex workers of the tech sector in .CN that have xp in building all the things?
* What are the implications to cost/design/[whatever-i-dont-know-to-ask]?
* ELI5 'submission for approval' and 'time to approval'
* do .cn gov employees work/are-embedded-at any given company?
* is it as totalitarian as it sounds or is it efficient?
* what cut does the government take?
* Who is reputable in the US to ensure a product can get built in china?
About embedding of workers: local employees who are party members will organize a party branch inside the company. The more powerful internal party members you have, the easier it will be to be given permission to do things, get licenses, etc, so they'll gain committee seats and power. So you end up with an internal organization with power in your company whose allegiances are to an outside agency.
If they can't serve the interests of two societies at once, they will serve the society that exerts more oversight and control.
Then
> in reality the only alternative is to abandon China to those who will do what they are ordered to
So the only alternative to doing business there - which requires doing as you're told - is leaving China to only businesses that will do what their told. I'm assuming you didn't mean to say that so can you explain?
Sounds like the "well, if I don't do it, someone else will" justification. Not the first time that has been used to justify an unethical action.