Joining Apple, Amazon’s China Cloud Service Bows to Censors | Hacker News Reader

Joining Apple, Amazon’s China Cloud Service Bows to Censors

nytimes.com

153 pointsJumpCrisscross164 comments

When you apply for ICP beian license at Aliyun (Alibaba's cloud), you either choose "I use Aliyun" and give them the server ID, or you choose "I use another server" and two additional fields appear: your server log in, your server password.

You need ICP license if you want to integrate any kind of service. Wechat, Alipay, other payment systems, SMS notifications etc, everything needs the ICP.

I guess AWS China also had to give up access to all servers to govt. And given the govt "professionalism" (check the China's Ministry of Information website), that's not the kind of access I'd like to give away.

If you are ready for that, is it possible for a foreign company to obtain an ICP license and thus operate in China?

AFAIK it is possible now to get the ICP, but to integrate Wechat / Alipay or any other meaningful service you need a Chinese legal entity. A foreign company can register WFOE which is a Wholly Foreign Owned Enterprise, you do not need any Chinese partners or anything, but might be costly to set up and in paid-up capital depending on the industry. E.g. for a fashion brand I know of, they asked to have ¥10 million ($1.5 million) to be deposited within 1 year.

Thanks!

What password? SSH password? What if you use SSH keys? None of my AWS instances have passwords and even in the days when I had EC2 instances in Beijing a couple years ago there were no passwords to them. (I wasn't hosting a public-facing service so no ICP was necessary. But still, any non-idiotic sysadmin won't be having password authentication to all their servers.)

Then you don't get the license. I have an app built on top of Zappa, using Lambda + API Gateway, I don't even have an IP address! :)

Anyway, for NOW, the possible workaround, as I've heard, shall we say, is to use a temporary server, get the ICP and then change your DNS to point to the real server. For NOW they don't track it, but you need to re-apply every 12-24 months (rinse & repeat). However, it gives them every ground to shut your service down without any warning.

Usually not having the ICP also means your site is dog slow and prone to being blocked at any moment.

Of course if your site is actually needed enough this rule kind of gets ignored. See: GitHub. They probably don't have an ICP license or plans to get one and yet it works really well in China (not even joking)

I remember Github has been blocked in the past . See https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_of_GitHub#China

Yeah, and then they realized that most tech companies rely on it.

The original block was way too wide, now they just block gist which is obviously used by dissidents to spread unlawful propaganda. The whole family of pastebin and pastebin-like websites is blocked for the same reason.

And URL shorteners. Almost impossible to find one that isn't blocked

In case you assumed that corporate responsibility is actually taken to heart by those making corporate strategic decisions, let this show you that it is not. Corporate responsibility moves are little more than good PR, a product selling point, and a way to avoid fines in some jurisdictions. Money matters more than morals. These corporations want access to the Chinese market. To gain access (and profit from) to the Chinese market, you must play ball with the state.

When has that ever been in doubt with regard to China? To do any major business in China you have to partner with a local company --which typically have ties to the CCP.

This is nothing new. Is there a difference btwn opening factories in China and legally outsourcing work to local cos which may or may not comply with even local labor and environmental laws and bowing to their local mores when it comes to softer areas like western ideas about civil liberties? That in no way means I agree with their view --I'm just asking are the two not different sides of the same coin and we (the "west") pretty much fully accepted the one side a long time ago.

I remember reading about this decades ago in "One World, Ready or Not" by Greider: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/285435.One_World_Ready_o...

Well worth the read to understand the different forces tugging on global corporations.

Maybe there's a middleground? You've still got to pick your battles and understand the scope of them. It's also entirely reasonable for a company to not to choose to follow a particular fight because it's too expensive or would have to much of an impact on the strategy of the company.

If a company decides to not fund healthcare for everyone in the US, even if that aligned with their values and CSR, there's no need to take a cynical look at that.

Definitely a middle ground but that's not what is being occupied here.

Aiding Chinese censorship for a quick buck is your idea of a "reasonable middleground"?

Apple's been 'aiding Chinese censorship' in hundreds of ways to the tune of billions of dollars for well over a decade and you were ok with it all until they took VPN's off the app store? Lol.

If increased awareness isn't a reason to change our minds and we stubbornly stick to ideas we had a decade ago we're in trouble.

"We're" already in trouble. Just like HN commenters wisely advise not to build your company on top of someone else's service, the entire planet has built their service on China's manufacturing. The thinking (if there even was any, I personally doubt it) was that we'd just use them for labor intensive but low intellectual assembly work, but it seems no one considered if China was happy to continue being the servant of the West indefinitely.

China seems like a country happy to play the long game, but I don't think they're even going to have to.

Amazon's Cloud services aren't made in China - it's the Chinese market they want, not Chinese factories. China depends on foreign markets for its factories output, but generally isn't as keen on having its (huge) market buying foreign goods and services. Having saturated their other markets, Western companies are desperate to tap into China to keep their growth numbers.

> Western companies are desperate to tap into China to keep their growth numbers

Yes they are, and China isn't stupid enough to allow that, and there's nothing the west can do about it without sinking the ship they are in. With the west being a democracy with most major decisions being made by individual corporations, to me it looks like a near certain checkmate for China, provided they don't have something like a major financial crisis.

What's missing here is context. The reason we are seeing a spate of similar news on this is because China recently changed the law, and so companies are making sure they comply with the law as a first step before figuring out further strategies.

Now maybe they take no further steps, but it's unreasonable to expect companies to entirely end their entire China operations based on a new law whose implications are not fully understood.

Instead they are making sure they are in compliance and seeing the specifics of what that entails before deciding what if anything to do next.

So they should have just defied the Chinese government, had all their manufacturing facilities cut off, and just closed up shop and called it a day?

Of course they don't agree with it, but they don't have the power to effectively ignore their demands right now. Yes, this sucks, but it means they get to live and fight another day, hopefully when they do have a bargaining chip.

Yes. There's no bargaining with communists, there is only wiping them from the earth.

Agreed. In China, the government controls the flow of money. Sadly, there's a saying among us Chinese netizens: "China is now powerful/rich enough, that no one can actually save us from it."

China is a giant corporation-like kleptocracy, the product of which is the labour of Chinese people. Now that the population that output cheap labour wanes as the demographic data deteriorates. Situations will change.

Unlikely. Even now China has a surplus of 300 to 400 million people that work as subsistence farmers. There's nothing else for them to do. China's manufacturing is no longer expanding meaningfully. They have a truly massive supply of inexpensive labor still accordingly; however those people working as impoverished farmers have nowhere to go, and are held in place by the government, with no rights to property ownership of the farming land (which is also why China's farming productivity is so horrendous, it's intentional).

They have hundreds of millions of people living on less than $5 per day still. It's one of the greatest supplies of available cheap labor on the planet, and it's not disappearing any time soon.

Now that China has built up immense wealth domestically (along with the productivity, economic capability and infrastructure linked to that step-up), which is very tightly contained within its borders by law, the Communist Party's position is cemented. They have unlimited reach within their borders, they can use any of their industrial might for anything they want at any time, and they can seize any assets they want to at any time. That wealth isn't going away, and their ability to use/abuse it at will is also not going away. Their eventual population decline will do nothing more than than raise the median standard of living.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hukou_system

Exactly, everyone who says China is doomed due to demographics overlooks the huge pool of under-utilized labor. People are looking at percentages when they should be looking at raw numbers.

With a shrinking demography, one problem is that the size of pool of elite is also shrinking. Physics professors in top universities of China has complained on social media that the younger generation lacked both dedication and intuition, that he had to lower the bar for his final exam to extremely easy.

An older guy complaining young people are lazy?

I am shocked. Absolutely shocked.

Not only lazy but weak in academics.

You really can't imagine how hard working were the older generation of China. It was even kinda brutal from young people's points now. Srsly, an Asian's "lazy" (remember an A- is a F there)?

Pretty sure the "extremely easy" exam will fail 90% of the class if moved to US

> the size of pool of elite is also shrinking.

China has a bench of hundreds of millions of people they can call on. With their track record, I don't think Chinese leadership needs to take advice on how to develop a country from anyone.

That is exactly the same way i see it after a few trip to China. And its GDP per Capita will grow once these older generation pass away.

China is playing the long game here. And I dont see it getting any real trouble for the next 10 - 13 years. (2030).

Perhaps one of the more accurate analysis of China, but I disagree with Communist party's position is cemented. Just like the US is having a Coasts vs Hinterland clash, China is having that clash on steroids. The whole silk road program is basically trying to move some of the coastal wealth to interior to placate the populations etc. Their wealth is certainly not going away, but it will contained in Coastal, added to that a trade war with USA is brewing and a real war in Korean peninsula, will certainly shock their system.

It's no surprise. Even if Apple or Amazon wanted to resist this, they won't get any competent support from the current US administration. The strategy for the time being seems to be "don't rock the boat" for US businesses right now.

Strategy has always been dont rock the boat, just as during dismantling of US car industry, or TV industry.

Frontline: Coming From Japan [The Fall Of The US Television Industry] (1992) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aesJTsZqm6c

> just as during dismantling of US car industry

GM and Ford sales: $317 billion

Dismantling, no. What actually happened, is the global market for automobiles drastically expanded from ~1960 forward with globalization and equally dramatic increases in the global median standard of living. Ford and GM didn't get dismantled, they gained a large number of new, competent international competitors that divided up a radically larger global pie.

Further, see: automobile production within the US by Toyota et al. which is vast. That counts as part of the US car industry.

What? Why do they need support from the adminstration. Either they do business in China, and implicity endorse all the anti-freedom, or they do not. Sure it would cost them revenue and share price. Well right and wrong are not economic propositions.

Seems like we've had these Engagement vs Isolation conversations before in the US.

Because even the largest companies (especially the largest companies) rely heavily on the organs of government to help negotiate and solve issues which are geopolitical in nature.

A cursory reading of some leaked state department cables or any analysis of how statecraft works shows that business and government work together to pressure and negotiate over things which affect multinational companies.

fyi AWS China is different from aws worldwide. It has its own portal https://www.amazonaws.cn, different set of services, policies, etc.

Many cool fancy new features on aws worldwide is not available on aws china. Some of the differences even breaks third party libraries. e.g. some version of boto.

GovCloud is isolated an a very similar manner, though still operated by AWS.

CN is operated (and likely owned) by a party other than Amazon, as Amazon ownership would make the org ineligible for an ICP (as of 2014, anyway)

Does it belong to Amazon.com or does it not?

Aws has the tech stack, the datacenter is joint venture.

Depends what you mean by "belong to", from the linked article:

China requires foreign companies have a local partner and restricts them from owning a controlling stake in any cloud company

So part of it belongs to.

What are they supposed to do? Either they comply or they leave the Chinese market. It's that simple. I hope people don't fault these companies for playing ball with a communist government.

That is what I was curious about. That is a country four times the size of America. It would be interesting to see how the conversation went in Apples and Amazons board room though.

"We rollin'?"

"We rollin'"

They do have influence here (in US) and there (in China). They should certainly comply with law and push for change together with US government. If change is not happening and laws aren't just then they certainly should leave.

Certainly should leave?

Perhaps a naïve question but I mean it honestly: What relevance does communism have here? Is "communist" just being used as a synonym for corrupt or is there another meaning?

I'm not American so I suspect I don't associate communism with the same things you do.

The Chinese government calls itself a communist government. I think the above comment is using communist as shorthand for 'authoritarianism clothed in communism,' which is normally the way things have turned out (USSR, China, Vietnam).

"Communist" implies authoritarian, as in a one-party state.

Upon further reading, it seems this is largely due to the fact that previous implementations of communist society have included an authoritarian government.

I'm mainly reading the Wikipedia pages but it seems that communism in theory is actually stateless and doesn't have a government at all, let alone an authoritarian one:

"A communist society is characterized by common ownership of the means of production with free access to the articles of consumption and is classless and stateless, implying the end of the exploitation of labor."

"Marx and Engels maintained that a communist society would have no need for the state as it exists in contemporary capitalist society. The capitalist state mainly exists to enforce hierarchical economic relations, to enforce the exclusive control of property, and to regulate capitalistic economic activities—all of which would be non-applicable to a communist system."

From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communist_society

Intent is understood though, thanks.

I'm not American either, I'm Bolivian.

Not the dreaded "C" word! Thank god capitalist countries have such outstanding human rights records.

I take your point, but China specifically has an absysmal, wretched human rights record.

So fits well with companies from the US, which also specifically has an appalling human rights record.

Interesting ... how many dissidents are currently rotting in Google's prisons?

Or, more to the point, in US prisons? Arguably Chelsea Manning, but her offense (stealing secrets) was considerably different from mere speech, and she's out of prison now.

US prisons; Political dissidents not so much, but instead look at the general prison situation, particularly blacks and impoverished, and you start to see what I'm talking about. Then there's the whole Guantanamo bay thing...

This is one of the reasons that it's so hard to have constructive conversations about this sort of issue – the gross hyperbole.

The US judicial system, prisons and government obviously have many flaws, arguably getting worse, and has a difficult relationship with human rights. However, the US government does not do things like nationally censor particular children's cartoons because they might insult the president (https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/jul/17/winnie-the-poo...) or jail human rights activists for 'subversion' (https://www.theguardian.com/world/2009/dec/25/china-jails-li...).

The US has a human rights problem in some senses; China has an objectively worse one. It's okay to criticise the latter as well.

Wasn't trying to stop people from criticising China's; I agree it's appalling. But many seem to forget that the US' is also terrible.

That's called whataboutism and it's a common tactic to try and divert attention and excuse appalling behaviour.

Fixed for you -

The Chinese judicial system, prisons and government obviously have many flaws, arguably getting worse, and has a difficult relationship with human rights. However, the Chinese government does not do things like operating Guantanamo Bay or cause civilian deaths using WMD as excuses. How many civilians got killed in Iraq as a direct consequence of US invasion? Their lives worth less than those human right activists?

Censoring winnie the pooh? then tell me how come there are tens of thousands of winnie the pooh related products (toys, books, clothes etc) on Taobao.com?

https://s.taobao.com/search?ie=utf8&q=winnie+the+pooh

I find it baffling that there is an idea that China's records on human rights is comparable to that of the US. The US has human rights problems, and China's are objectively much worse.

Please define what metric(s) you're using to make that statement. I'm not saying you're wrong, but a statement of objectivity requires something to substantiate it. Certainly, the US doesn't have nearly as many political dissidents incarcerated, but China doesn't have a systematic problem with summary executions of a racial group by police (for example; there are plenty more on both sides, which are not necessarily comparable; yes I know in this case that China has its own minority racial group issues). Then, are scale effects (population size) factored in your figures?

China has an appalling human rights record and they aren't trying to get much better.

Yes, playing ball with a despotic authoritarian regime is precisely what people are faulting these companies for.

A lot of companies left the market in South Africa market in the 1980s, to which the parallels are obvious.

But they didn't do it because they suddenly woke up and felt like doing the right thing; they did it because people's outrage over human rights in South Africa began to threaten the profits gained from playing ball there[1].

That's why articles like this one are important.

[1]: https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1986/11/17/t...

South Africa is tiny, China is an 800 pound gorilla upon which the majority of the world's manufacturing depends. The decision of whether to "play ball" with China needs to be made at the government level, and 10+ years ago. It's too late now, the horse is out of the barn. China, and only China, will decide how they act on the world stage.

Why are you acting like Apple is the first company to face this dilemma? Google faced a decade ago and chose not to play ball with China with no assistance from any government.

… and subsequently capitulated anyway. That's kind of key here.

How am I acting like that?

How do you recommend Apple goes about terminating its relationship with China? Do you think it would have comparable costs and disruption to their business that Google's did?

Which basically ends up to the classic deontological vs consequentialist ethic theories. I believe though that if enough companies like Amazon and Google won't accept the conditions imposed by the government then, after some time, they may decide to change their politics.

Sure. A cabal of tough-as-nails Chinese leaders who lived through the cultural revolution and command the largest standing army on earth will change their politics because Jeff Bezos gives them the cold shoulder.

This is western arrogance at its peak.

I think you are underestimating the power of the western economy and the negative impact of isolationism. China don't want to play alone.

Sure - if we imposed across-the-board tariffs on Chinese goods and Europe and Japan did likewise, that would be a very, very long lever.

Outside of FantasyLand, that will never happen. And Amazon leaving China will have even less impact on China's polity than Google's leaving China did.

Don't get me wrong - unlike Apple who really can't leave China and continue to make smartphones, Amazon could and should leave China. Amazon, like Google, will have to comply and cooperate with Chinese authorities in uncomfortable and unethical ways that I think will make it hard for Amazon to retain their best and brightest employees in the rest of the world. And Amazon will never be allowed to gain marketshare or influence in China at the expense of a local company - the deck will be sufficiently stacked against them until they lose, much like what Google was facing.

"All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing."

I thought you were only supposed to comply with laws you like. ;)

So again, companies are fighting and vocal about "freedom", equality, lgbt rights etc only when it's convinient for them, as soon as they see that it might make them lose money - they will do whatever it takes to keep that cash flowing. Look at Tim Cook, how vocal he was in US with his LGBT support and anti-Trump position and other topics, but as soon as he sees that he can lose cash from China he does almost the same thing as what he is fighting against in US. How are these companies leaders different from those people in China who sit at a top of food chain and do same things because they worry about losing money after losing control...

Tim Cook runs a multi-national corporation. His obligation is to a shareholders as CEO. It is a simple as that.

A lot of us don’t agree with these policy decisions by these companies, but there they are.

Fine. Tim Cook loses all his SJW cred then, for whatever that's worth.

> SJW cred

I really hope this isn't gonna start being a "thing" I see on HN

It's a myth that companies are legally required to maximise profit.

Then he should not yell left and right how he is fighting for freedom and human rights, just so he can win some "points" from people...It's always easy to make it look like you are fighting against something bad when your ass is safe and warm...

There can be some ethical issues orthogonal to profit and loss considerations though. Now would shareholders be able to sue Cook for losing money by fighting the Chinese government, I have no idea, but its not quite as simple as that, that's letting them off the hook too easily in my opinion.

Whatever the truth of fiduciary duty may be, it is definitely not any company's fiduciary duty under American law to expand to China and serve customers there, even if it would make investors more money.

How is shareholder's interest any different from corrupted government interest? You either support freedom of information, or you do not.

> You either support freedom of information, or you do not.

You don't give a damn but pretend that you do to the public.

Do you suggest all companies boycott China then cause there is no other way to break into the market?

I just suggest them not to proclaim then that they are "proud" fighters for human rights and freedom...

There's no reason to believe these are anything but PR stunts.

> he does almost the same thing as what he is fighting against in US

That's baloney, they are not remotely the same thing.

"As expected, Apple CEO Tim Cook accepted the Free Expression Award at the Newseum in Washington D.C. tonight. At the event, Cook was presented the award and made brief comments on what it means to him and Apple, as well as touching on the importance of companies taking a stance…" [1]

[1] - https://9to5mac.com/2017/04/18/tim-cook-free-expression-awar...

I'm not disputing the idea that Tim Cook has taken stances on certain issues including human rights. I'm disputing the idea that by complying with a Chinese law means he's "doing almost the same thing as what he's fighting against". That's rubbish.

I am sure a lot of leaders in china do not agree with what is going on there and draconian laws but they can't say anything against it since they will lose control and revenue if they get dropped from the top. Same with apple, it might not agree with what they are doing but they are too worried about their revenue stream to speak up against it. The difference is that at least Chinese don't act like hypocrites in this case. They don't proclaim to be fighters for human rights and freedoms.

Same thing is happening in Russia for example with corruption. A lot of new people who come work in higher positions just could not go agains the corrupted system, if someone that has control over their position tells them to do something, they will do it because otherwise they will be end up with no job and money. Those who speak up without worrying about their lost revenue are the real heros, not Tim Cook who was made look like one with his recent announcements

Many of these specific laws are very directly anti-free-expression. Complying there while accepting a free expression award is about as clear as possible an example of "doing almost the same thing as what he's fighting against".

"complying"... the law is the law. behaving in an illegal manner which will only get you shutdown doesn't seem like a great strategy.

Shutting down voluntarily is also legal. Remember that the question wasn't about business strategy. The question is whether he is "doing almost the same thing as what he's fighting against". And the answer seems to be yes.

Expensive options are not the only way to solve this dilemma. They could simply amend their position on free expression to explain why this is an exception. Such an explanation might not even reflect badly on them.

All gay internet content is illegal in China[1].

By blocking VPNs, Tim Cook is helping to ban all gay content.

[1] http://fortune.com/2017/06/30/china-homosexuality-internet-w...

are you suggesting that apple engage in illegal activities?

Do you consider Google to be engaging in illegal activities by refusing to censor content according to China's wishes? Then yes, I am suggested Apple engage in illegal activities.

consider? the law is the law. apple will simply be subjected to massive damage.

Will Google?

"The law is the law" is a very simplistic way of looking at things.

Laws can be challenged in court. Google is doing that with a Canadian law right now[1].

Laws can be found unconstitutional. Laws can be overturned. Laws can be repealed.

Laws can be unenforced. For example smoking weed in Colorado. A simple "the law is the law" outlook might conclude that it's illegal to sell weed in Colorado, and any business doing so "will simply be subjected to massive damage".

Laws can be interpreted and misinterpreted by judges, lawyers, prosecutors, etc. Smart people can disagree about what a law means. Some interpretations say anyone under 13 who reads the New York Times website is a criminal under the CFAA[2].

Some people argue that the average person commits 3 felonies a day[3].

[1] https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/07/google-sues-in-u...

[2] https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/04/are-you-teenager-who-r...

[3] https://www.amazon.com/Three-Felonies-Day-Target-Innocent/dp...

until a law is removed from the books, it remains the law.

none of these other details are particularly relevant to obeying the law when it is in effect.

If a law is on the books but completely unenforced, how is it relevant?

Apple should obey every old illogical law from 200 years ago that's never enforced, and is actually harmful if followed?

Many of the other details are relevant as well. Apple could obey the law and challenge it, like Google is doing with the Canadian law.

Apple's issue isn't just about 'losing money'. Their supply and manufacturing chain is in China. They have their throat laid bare on this one, and if they stood on principle, their throat would be cut in short order.

that he can lose cash from China he does almost the same thing as what he is fighting against in US

I'm kind of wondering how you think its possible to run a large company while 'losing cash' because your supply chain is suddenly unavailable? Or because your competitors have a lower cost structure than you do?

Do you know what American consumers will do if Tim Cook doesn't feed them the bullshit about how it's realistic to impose American values on their Chinese partners? American consumers will go buy a f'ing Samsung. Samsung's ethical record is horrifying and truly shameful - far worse than anything Apple has ever done or consented to - but American ignorance of and indifference to other cultures spares Samsung the same burden that Apple and Tim Cook bear. Cook needs to feed his customers the bullshit; Samsung, Xiaomi, Huawei etc don't.

> as soon as he sees that he can lose cash from China

...or the company being severely damaged by asset seizures, manufacturing capabilities decimated, and people going to prison for flagrantly engaging in illegal activities.

Eventually they will find out that the cost is too high and the profit is too low. The make deal with Satan

I'm sure they've spent plenty of time running the numbers

Yes, and did they take into account a backstabbing from the Chinese government (both national and local) and the stealing and then re-using of their IP for the purpose of replacing them in China in due time?

They are public corporations. They probably only took into account the next 2 years of profits they could make there, put it in balance and said "yup, betraying our Chinese users as well as our principles is worth it."

But is it? Will it be? We'll see.

> They are public corporations. They probably only took into account the next 2 years of profits they could make there

That's exactly how Amazon & Jeff Bezos have not operated over the last two decades. See: their latest quarterly report.

The people making these decisions care about their stock and stock options, not the long term future of Apple or the USA.

How is this different from companies abiding to a country's tax laws for example. If you want to do business in a country, you stick to its rules. China's rules call for censorship so companies must comply or leave. A bit too simplistic but that's how I see it.

Perhaps I am just a jaded westerner, but the ability to freely spread ideas counter to the ruling government is a fundamental right.

Sad the world we live in. We need the world to reach for Western standards of openness, freedom, and dignity and put people before profits. Instead, I see us altering our way of life to the least common denominator of state coercion.

Should I, an employee of Amazon, quit, if I do not support this policy?

That's going to be up to you, the Amazon employee.

Personally, I'm able to distinguish myself from the company and I my identity isn't the company's, so I wouldn't see a need to quit my job over something like this.

Any company is a sum of its employees. One certainly is part of the company's identity.

Yes, but the company isn't a part of my identity.

That's going to be up to you, the Amazon employee.

Personally, I'm unwilling to work for a company who's values are in severe opposition to my own, so I would probably quit my job over something like this (if I felt strongly enough about it).

Have to admit, perhaps that thought only came so strong because of me literally yesterday reading https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiananmen_Square_protests_of_1... , knowing about this information being censored in China, and, suddenly, Amazon submissing to government to prevent people from accessing it. Right now feels too dramatic.

Living by strong personal principles in a world that no longer has any is a recipe for a very unhappy life.

The business and government leaders of the world have, over more than a decade of decisions, put us on this path, what's going to happen will happen. Don't sacrifice your life in some futile attempt to "do the right thing", it won't change anything other than harm you.

As option mentioned above, SDE job market is very hot right now, so finding another position will not be a problem.

It may be, but it's a bad habit to get into imho.

If you are software engineer, then you are spoiled for choice. When I left Bing, their censorship in China (unlike Google) was a minor reason for me leaving. So, while it wasn't the reason, it did contribute to my decision to leave. And, again, we (SWEs) are spoiled for choice, hence taking issues like this into the account is certainly possible.

That's going to be up to you, the amazon employee.

(Unrelated: is this a reference that I don't get? 4 people have responded with exactly this!)

Yeah, I am also puzzled. Even checked comments to ensure these are not bots.

on another post, i saw a comment suggesting that kite employees leave that company; not sure if related.

That's going to be up to you, the Amazon employee.

That makes no sence. Any company would try to maximize its profit in such situation, so if you don't like this you will have to become self-employed.

Any tech bigco will probably have something you are uncomfortable with, it pretty much become inevitable at that stage.

with Amazon's wildly reported low retention rate, you are going to leave in a few months anyway.

https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2015-08-17/a-job-at-...

It is sad that Amazon does concessions for China while being blatantly hidered by them. For example amazonaws links are blocked by WeChat due to "This page has been reported multiple times as it rewards users for sharing on social network or following a brand." (This particular link was a direct link to a bus ticket in PDF format).

The explanation is especially shaky since the whole point of wechat is to share stuff and follow brands...

Amazon is too big, they can't afford to act otherwise. We should all build medium size, privately owned companies and at least try to have a spine. The background of the problem is nicely highlighted in DHH's blog post "Enough".

I don't understand the point of this report. Any server in China always subjects to GFW's censorship power. Or does it mean that a Chinese customer of Amazon Web Service can not rent a cloud server abroad for VPN purpose?

I'm not surprised.

Cash rules everything around me.

Like dominos they bow before their God of money.

I wonder how much a publicly traded company could act upon their values, as opposed to the primary value of seeking value for shareholders. For instance, if an Apple or Amazon takes a stand and ends up having to pull out of China, would that be grounds for a shareholder lawsuit?

I haven't heard of any such lawsuit against Google.

Google wasn't giving up too much in China. The search engine wasn't getting much tractions, based on differing asthetics.

Chinese websites are far more clustered and busy - take a look at https://world.taobao.com/. I guess that it's being shifted - baidu seems relatively uncluttered, but the Chinese aesthetic is cramming as much information as possible on the same web page.

>but the Chinese aesthetic is cramming as much information as possible on the same web page

I suspect that the language just simply looks busy to people who aren't fluent/native, even if you know enough to actually read it. I had the same complaint in Japan, even though I could read most of it. At the same time, even in English, a large complaint on here is that most redesigns simply result in a dumbed down design with less information density.

No, it's a completely different design aesthetic. If anything, Japanese / Chinese websites should be less cluttered because the characters can potentially convey more in lesser space. Not everything is cultural relativism.

Baidu has long had an uncluttered, Google-like homepage, e.g. in Jan 2010: https://web.archive.org/web/20100101155014/http://www.baidu....

It's true that before its departure Google China was losing market share to Baidu, reportedly at least in part due to government throttling which slowed Google's service to a crawl: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/china/6143553...

Still, Google China's share of the market was not negligible. The article above claimed it had only just dipped under 30%; StatCounter (accurately or not) claims Google China was still above 40% in early 2010: https://gs.statcounter.com/search-engine-market-share/all/ch...

Either way, that's a significant fraction, more than Bing has ever had in the US. Not to mention the size of the Chinese market or future growth potential (consider what Google could have done with Android in China).

Google could have responded to the pressure by seeking to appease the Chinese government. Other companies have done so, many profitably. Google did not.

for that 30% claimed market share, a large % of them had to search "google" in Baidu to get to google.com because they didn't know how to spell the word google.

http://www.baidu.com/ https://www.google.com/

Shareholder lawsuits are among the least worrisome for a public corporation. They happen frequently. They very, very rarely end up adding up to anything that matters.

Why is that? There's an extraordinarily high bar to jump over if you're a shareholder and you want to sue and win, when it comes to showing damages from a corporation's decisions. I should emphasize it again: the bar is extraordinarily high.

It's so high, it's difficult for shareholder lawsuits to prevail against companies like Valeant Pharmaceuticals.

I'm glad everyone is so anti-censorship in this thread! Should tech companies also ignore censorship at the hands of European governments or Canada via "right to be forgotten" legislation? I seem to recall people on this site saying that it would be wrong for tech companies to resist the government in those cases. At least China isn't attempting to force censorship in other countries, unlike the Canadian government.

Google is fighting the Canadian court right now.

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/07/google-sues-in-u...

Good, but my point was that people on HN were generally in support of Canadian censorship.

That "forced censorship" isn't about a right to be forgotten or any reasonable definition of freedom of expression. It's about a company violating IP rights.

The US government puts the same pressure on Google. Worse actually, because the DCMA expects it to be done without a court order (which has lead to rampant abuse on sites like youtube).

Of course, I should have figured that our censorship was for good reasons, but not Chinese censorship. After all, copyright interests are clearly worth censoring for, but whatever excuse the Chinese government used (State interests?) aren't.

I don't agree with a lot of the censorship for copyright eihter (nintendo and lets play videos is one such example).

You seriously can't see the rather important moral difference between "take down this site selling copies of my stuff as their own" vs "take down this criticism of the government massacring citizens"?

The recent Canadian and European takedown cases covered here on HN weren't about "stuff I own", they were about "inconvenient information I want to remove from public view". Still covered under copyright law.

To all these "you either support freedom of information or you dont" commenters:

If life was only so simple.

No sane CEO would try to fight against Chinese government risking their access to the market.

Even if the goal for the company is freedom of information, pissing of Chinese government, risking the safety of the company employees in China and getting smoked out by the shareholders is not gonna help anyone. It's much better to initially comply with their rules, gain their trust and try to change things in the long run. Might never work but still better than this "in or out" idiotism which will never work.

Disagree. In my opinion, American/other foreign tech companies have gotten a raw deal in China, with constant technology theft and hindered access to the domestic market, in addition to the usual suppression of dissent/free speech. I haven't seen any signs that this has been changing for the better, so why should American tech companies engage in China?

One possible reason is they want to keep earning report looking good (or maintain a so-called "fast growth" because the bubble is too big. Believe it or not, China has everything to fill your tech bubble despite some restrictions.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com