Google Plans to Launch Censored Search Engine in China, Leaked Documents Reveal | Hacker News Reader

Google Plans to Launch Censored Search Engine in China, Leaked Documents Reveal

theintercept.com

492 pointscrispinb414 comments

There might be many tech companies in China, no doubt, including big names, and companies should comply with local regulations if they want to do business, however the fact that Google pulled their search engine out of China, defying their censorship attempts, is one big reason for why I respected Google, in spite of my reservations for them.

So let me tell you what I think as an EU citizen that's actively concerned about both freedom of speech and privacy ...

I couldn't give a crap about what companies are active in China and complying with their local regulations. That Google took a stand showed they valued freedom of speech above their bottom line, but now if they are going back in, we can talk about the primary concern with Google ...

Google is the destroyer of privacy. Google tracks their users at an unprecedented level in the whole history of humanity and if they do this, we now have concrete proof that they don't have values that are above their bottom line.

Therefore we have a problem and the next time the EU slaps them with another multi-billion fine for violating EU's anti-trust or privacy laws, I'll cheer them for it, because it's all about the dough.

> we now have concrete proof that they don't have values that are above their bottom line.

I had the same reaction. Back in the day, there was this common belief tech companies had a certain set of values and would draw a line. Now? It's always about the money.

Welcome to the decline of Western Civilization.

That previous position seems insanely naive now. I wonder if western civilization is actually propped up by a collective naivety among its population.

"...Google is the destroyer of privacy. Google tracks their users at an unprecedented level in the whole history of humanity..."

In fairness, you never had a problem with that privacy invasion before. You still respected them in spite of the fact that they were Gestapo-like privacy invaders. As evidenced by your claim that, "...the fact that Google pulled their search engine out of China, defying their censorship attempts, is one big reason for why I respected Google..."

I've always been wary of Google. They are not our friends. They are here trying to make money off of us. They would sell any one of us out to any number of governments if they were asked.

And they would do so without hesitation.

That's the reason that we need to be mindful of what we disclose to companies like Google, Facebook, et al.

Well no, I did have a problem, I moved off GSuite to FastMail, I moved off Android, I'm a DuckDuckGo user, I went back to Firefox even before the Quantum release.

But I had a lot of respect for Google for pulling out of China on censorship considerations and in fairness (unlike others) they seemed fairly responsible with how they treated the data they collect. Their security at least has been top notch, plus I've seen G employees with good values and a voice.

But seeing them backtrack on a decision that I respected is pretty bad. I mean, it's worse if they've never pulled out of China in the first place. Because now I start thinking it was all a marketing stunt.

Except there is clear evidence that FastMail employees are able and willing to read through your personal emails, and they've become actively user-hostile in their support: https://twitter.com/shazow/status/1021570521987731458

Make of it what you will, but I worked at Google for a time and I came out more convinced that my data is safer there. This was 2012 so maybe things have changed since then, but we need better alternatives than things like FastMail (and I'd argue Firefox, but that's for another thread).

Employee A reading email X does not scale. Google reading everyone's email with ever-better AI systems does scale, and is a much bigger threat to freedom, political or economical.

You don't need deep machine learning to write a simple script to fetch data from your servers.

If Google can read all Gmail users' emails, Fastmail can read all their users' emails.

I think maybe the point is that reading all your emails seems to be Google’s business model, while FastMail is a service provider that charges users for the service? Also, regarding “your data” being more secure with google... is more like Google is good at securing their main asset, which is Google’s data about you.

Google no longer uses Gmail data for targeting. No person or ai is reading your email from your grandmother, florist, or then confirmation that you bought paper towels on Amazon.

But employee A can search for a very specific thing, something that machine learning won't be able to do. So it does not need to scale if they want to target a single person.

Employee A has no clue which person to target. Nor does he know which emails to pay attention to. His search tools are primitive. His brain's processing power is limited. OTOH, Google's core business is scalable search.

> Employee A has no clue which person to target. Nor does he know which emails to pay attention to.

Yes, he does: he looks up the people he knows about.

A person reading your mail is a much more immediate, direct danger than your mails being slurped into the big data silo that can slowly and widely ruin society.

> that can slowly and widely ruin society.

There is nothing to say these "big data silos" will run "slowly." And even if they ran slowly, the impact they could have on your life would likely be far larger than the more immediate impact of an employee reading your email.

It seems likely there is significant auditing at FastMail for access. For example, at one time when I asked them to check on why an email wasn't displaying correctly in their client, they asked me to create a folder with a specific name, and put it in that folder[1]. This suggests they have a process to request access to content that logs what is requested, and only displays the content requested.

If you were, as in the tweet, to offer up specific subject lines, they would probably run a search that would only show the employee those subject lines, which you disclosed to them when you offered that information up to them. Not that they were logging into your account and scrolling through your inbox.

I don't consider employees of my mail service accessing my mail on my direct request to help me is a hostile act. I do consider automated reading of my email to profile me[2] on a mass scale to be a hostile act. I probably would not have my email at FastMail if I believed anyone working at FastMail had a vendetta against me, I suppose, but I know for a fact that quite a few Googlers dislike me. :P

[1] I will say I feel like the appropriate way to handle this, which I offered, was to forward them the email in question, since my account was not relevant to the issue.

[2] Note that while Gmail "doesn't use your email for advertising", it does build a Purchases database populated with data from your email in the Account Activity panel, which has literally no justification for existing if they aren't basing ads off of that. So there's a layer of obfuscation there: https://myaccount.google.com/purchases

Not sure what FastMail has to do with anything, that wasn't the point, but ...

I don't care if FastMail employees can read my email for support reasons. I actually expect FastMail employees to be able to read my email, since we aren't talking about end to end encryption. Unless end to end encryption is involved, then the stories of Google's encryption at rest are nothing more than bed time stories, since obviously their systems are not available to me for review.

And that's not what my privacy concerns are about for Google. I don't care about random Google employees, because that's not the biggest threat. The biggest threat is me and my family being profiled and I've seen evidence of this time and time again. It's also a big and real threat due to Google's size and reach.

FastMail is a better alternative first of all because FastMail is not Google, period. You may want security, but I want privacy and yes there's a difference.

I don't need a better reason than that, but if I ever discover that FastMail is a problem (which I doubt, since they are awesome), I'll pick the next email provider in line that's not Google.

At Google, the one time I'm aware of where a Gmail SRE read the mail of a woman he was interested in, he was detected, fired, and publicly called out officially by Google, which almost never happens in this industry and probably had permanent career consequences for him. They also locked things down further after this incident.

I'd be surprised if FastMail has that level of ability and willingness to detect and react to a rogue employee.

If the privacy threat you are concerned about is Google as a company allowing your data to be used in a way you're not happy with, such as profiling you can't sufficiently control, I can't argue with your logic beyond noting that they do offer lots of controls for most of the profiling they do. I similarly can't argue if you want to avoid providers within US jurisdiction.

But if your privacy threat model includes things like "an intelligence agency wants to access your data without a legal right to demand it," "a rogue employee is hoping to access your data without an approved business need," or "foreign state-sponsored actors might want to target you," Google is one of the most private places to put your data to combat those threats.

They have the resources to address those privacy attacks, and they do so. Of course your own operational security is also relevant for each of those privacy attack vectors, regardless of which third-party email provider you use.

(Disclosure: I worked for Google 2011-2015. I never worked on Gmail, and neither work nor speak for them now.)

Being wary of Google is a luxury. They control much of the technology market, if not the Internet, in both width and depth. Not using Google isn't a practical alternative for most people. Essentially everyone who works at Google can get a different job though.

Here is the thing for me, I don't necessarily mind companies like Google doing business in China. But that isn't because I like the Chinese system, but because I believe there are other ways, like with regulation, you should stand up for your values.

Whenever express those views on Hacker News I get downvoted, or called a shill. I get lectured about how the large tech companies are doing the right thing and how cool open source projects like signal, tor and bitcoin is going to save the world. I have to read through all the rants about how China is just protectionist, authoritarian and stealing intellectual property.

This isn't like Microsoft who built a presence in China over time or Apple who has at least somewhat of a pretense for being in China because of manufacturing. Here is probably the best moment ever given, and there is ever going to be, for those people to show that this wasn't all defensive bullshit. And that when developers, engineers and hackers are actually given a choice where they can quit their job or cancel contracts they will do so for what they believe in.

So I guess let's see what happens.

> Being wary of Google is a luxury

At this point in time, not really. There are better alternatives on the market for most of Google's services and products.

Email: I think that most people with an Internet connection good enough to access GMail can afford to pay $4 / month for email and their own domain and there are multiple good alternatives available, like FastMail or ProtonMail.

In some parts of this world with high levels of poverty, $4 might be a lot, but in western countries $4 is the price of one coffee and people do pay a lot of money on food and beverages.

DuckDuckGo has been better for me lately after I deleted all of my search history from Google. It's weird, but Google is really bad without personalization. I wonder if they do it on purpose. DDG isn't the only choice. For EU users there's also Qwant, see: https://about.qwant.com/

YouTube is hard to replace for users, but for creators Vimeo.com is much better. There's also PeerTube (joinpeertube.org) and increased awareness that YouTube is not good for projects that do NOT want ads, see the story of Blender being blocked: https://www.blender.org/media-exposure/youtube-blocks-blende...

Google Drive is a piece of shit. The web interface is pretty good, however I've seen their desktop client ignore updates or corrupt data and I simply cannot trust it for anything. And I'm speaking both of Drive File Stream and their Backup and Sync consumer client. The comparison with Dropbox's desktop client is night and day. Also Microsoft's OneDrive is cheaper. And https://syncthing.net is free.

Google Docs is OK for collaboration on documents, however their search is piss poor (we've been using Evernote because it has better search, Dropbox Paper too has better search), which means that collaboration in Google Docs doesn't scale, being where documents go to die. Also I'm catching offers for Office 365 Personal for about $25 per year and that's a superior choice for personal use.

Google Maps is good, but their coverage isn't that great in Easter Europe where I've traveled and in Romania where I live. OpenStreetMaps is actually better here. Currently trying out Maps.me. Not great, there used to be a great app made by a Romanian company named Skobler, but got bought by Scout and then it stopped receiving updates. Some people get by with Apple's Maps and HERE WeGo (former Nokia) is OK. But yes, Google Maps sent me in the middle of nowhere, on a dirt road in the woods, while traveling through Bulgaria.

Google Hangouts and Allo have never been popular and have plenty of alternatives. Zoom.us, Skype, Signal.

The only difficult move is from Android. I have an iPhone now, but it is more expensive and I don't like its restrictions. But if you're set on escaping Google, you could always install CyanogenMod on your phone without Google Play / Services and instead go with Amazon's App Store and / or with https://f-droid.org.

> Gestapo-like privacy invaders

Hum, I don’t remember Google actions has led to the slaughter of milliona of people. But, please enlight me.

The Gestapo also didn't solely cause that.

Alphabet Inc helped pro-American terrorists in Syria https://wikileaks.org/clinton-emails/emailid/12166#efmAMoAbj . Only a tribunal will show hopefully how many people were affected by this.

I didn't know opposing the brutal Syrian dictatorship got people labeled "Gestapo," but here we are.

There are many games where the only winning move is not to play. This is one of them. Helping either side is a crime against humanity.

Please stay away from Nazi comparisons like "Gestapo", unless it's actually comparable to actual actions of the Nazis. While Google privacy stance may be reprehensible and worrying, these privacy violations do not, last as I checked, imprison people in concentration camps, torture people, perpetuate ethnic cleansing on industrial scale and murder or imprison everyone opposing them. So let's please keep it in the sanity realm. Google (or at least some of it's actions) may be bad, but not nearly like Gestapo or anything Nazis did.

28 years later and Godwin's law still rings true as ever: "As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Hitler approaches 1"

It's a pretty stupid meme, even Mike Godwin said so.

Is it really? Google plans to comply with the CCP's censorship and information control plans.

The Chinese government are quite literally putting an entire ethnicity inside concentration camps as we speak.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/15/opinion/china-re-educatio...

https://foreignpolicy.com/2018/07/24/islamic-leaders-have-no...

No comparison warranted? The only thing refusing to compare the nazis to anything does is lets behavior like this thrive.

> They would sell any one of us out to any number of governments if they were asked. And they would do so without hesitation.

Google's annual transparency report indicates that they reject about a third of all government requests for user info.

Now that the plan is out in the open that Google has an active development project that censors the web with trivial government input, India will try to shoehorn Google into putting this into production with Indian populace. It will lead to degradation of democracy, while Google should be doing opposite since they bring the whole web to the user. Honestly, very very disconcerting from Google. Indian democracy is already fickle and project like this will accelerate the process even further. Also, minorities will be threatened even more since their vernacular is not on Google and English media news is not consumed by them. They live on local language news mainly, and they remain aloof from bigger machinations of the government against them. Absolutely appalling thinking about the future with this in use because India won't be able to push this project right now, but who knows what will happen when they are $5 Trillion economy 10-15 years from now. How come Sundar Pichai having an Indian background, didn't think about this aspect? Googlers please think about this one, and not endanger minorities because English language media in India is already biased and pushes officially sanctioned lines a lot, especially when it comes to minorities. Don't murder them please.

Only yesterday, a coworker and I were discussing how $5.5 billion is something like 5% of Google's cash reserves. All-in-all, not the end of the world.

My question in the end was: is $5.5 billion every few years actually enough to deter privacy violations by Google?

Not to interrupt another google bashing session on this site or stop an EU person from self-righteously patting themselves on the back but conflating several issues to justify political reprisal is exactly what's wrong with the EU's fine issuance regime and ad-hominem attacks on companies to try and justify the practice to yourself doesn't make it look better.

Also "anti-trust" is an american term with historical context (you use the generic term), we invented the practice, and unlike you we don't use it as a political and protectionist tool.

It's a different standard of measurement. American anti-trust is about preventing a monopoly from harming consumers via perverse incentives; European anti-trust is about preventing a competitor from driving other laborers out of the market (less emphasis placed on the end-result to the consumer).

Case in point (though it was France-specific, it highlights the difference in viewpoint): Amazon was fined by the French government because their discounts + Amazon Prime discount exceeded a legal limit of how deep a discount you were allowed to give on books. That limit was in place due to lobbying efforts by the book-seller's guild; it has nothing to do with bringing consumers the lowest price possible and everything to do with preventing individual sellers from driving each other out of business via short-term loss-leading discounts. Whether or not Amazon could offer its discounts because of more-efficient processes that minimize their overhead (such as being able to ship books to people only when needed instead of holding a bunch of brick-and-mortar real-estate to locally warehouse unsold merchandise) doesn't even enter into the discussion---drop below the critical price, pay the fine.

> It's a different standard of measurement. American anti-trust is about preventing a monopoly from harming consumers via perverse incentives; European anti-trust is about preventing a competitor from driving other laborers out of the market (less emphasis placed on the end-result to the consumer).

Which is odd, as I would say the EU have a far more impressive record of protecting the consumer than the US has.

> pulled their search engine out of China, defying their censorship attempts

They didn't pull their search engine out of China because of censorship requests, they pulled their search engine because the government kept trying to hack them and steal their source code, which they eventually did. So Google up and left.

Source: https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052702303493904575167...

They like to cite censorship and free speech to look better, but they knew exactly what they were getting into before setting foot in China -- the government of China made specific requirements before they could do business in China and Google agreed to those requirements. In fact, Google was criticized heavily for doing so. So don't buy into their history revisionism, they were on board with censorship from day 1. They had to be, or the PRC wouldn't allow them in.

Full article: http://archive.is/eOm2B

Thanks for sharing, I've only ever heard the "PR" flavor of why they left. This makes more sense.

Stephen Levy covers it heavily in "In The Plex".

If my memory serves, they censored Google.cn, but did not block users in China from the un-censored Google.com. The PRC alternated between blocking and unblocking .com.

My understanding of the final straw was the hacking of gmail to steal the communications and network info of Chinese dissidents and activists.

More info: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_China#Giving_up_Google_...

That was all part of the official story. It was "only" about 8 years ago so it is available online as well as on HN.

"A new approach to China"

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/01/new-approach-to-china... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1048800

"A new approach to China: an update"

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/03/new-approach-to-china... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1211090

"China condemns decision by Google to lift censorship"

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/8582233.stm

I don't know one way or the other, but this proves too much. You're talking about this like Google is the Borg and everyone always has the same opinions. It's certainly possible some of the people in the room at the time actually were motivated by free speech issues.

I agree about not trusting corporate PR, but the conclusion is that we don't know the company's motivations and it's probably a mistake to treat it as a consistent entity. Executives come and go. Sometimes they win arguments and sometimes they lose them. Sometimes they change their minds over the years.

Whether or not people at Google have different opinions is largely irrelevant, unless they’re going to engage in coordinated labor action like they did with the drone program.

Google, despite all its townhalls and Q&As, is not a democracy. It’s a corporation governed by an authoritarian command hierarchy who have seemingly chosen to get in bed with another authoritarian regime called the Chinese government.

> unless they’re going to engage in coordinated labor action like they did with the drone program.

What was this?

I believe this is in reference to employees quitting over the company's participation in the development of artificially intelligent weapons.

That was a big part of it, but there were also several other coordinated, internal campaigns. Here’s a good account by one of the Googlers involved:

https://jacobinmag.com/2018/06/google-project-maven-military...

There is a large middle ground between democracy and purely top-down command. I was actually talking about disagreement among executives. In an environment where people respect each others' opinions and areas of expertise, you don't need coordinated labor action for that to influence top-level decision-making.

The fact that this all has been kept secret (even from the rest of the organization) and that it leaked are both evidence for internal political divisions. Internal politics does matter, sometimes. I wonder what happens now that more Googlers know about it?

Fwiw I think you're being mildly too revisionist in the other direction. The major issue with the hacking wasn't stealing source code, but attempts to access user data. Certainly accessing source code is bad, but imo in general Google protects user data much moreso than source code.

(I work at Google)

>in general Google protects user data

How is storing and cataloging reams of private data 'protecting' it? If your significant other was constantly noting every friend you talked to, every purchase you made, videotaping your every move, would you call that protecting them?

To protect a user's data, it shouldn't even be collected in the first place. I think a better choice of words is that Google does a better job at monopolizing user data.

People mistake privacy for security.

Google has one of the most secure services on the Internet. At the same time Google is the biggest threat to privacy.

These two statements are not mutually exclusive. People simply don't get what privacy is about.

Security is complicated. I think the point was that if you don't store the unnecessary data then that data is 100% secure.

Sure, but the corollary to that is that security is complicated. Do you really expect the average user to have a more secure system than what they would otherwise have. In other words, is a Gmail account more or less secure than what you would have otherwise.

I think the answer depends, but it certainly isn't always "less". There's some information that you have to store somewhere, and is having a world class security team who works to actively mitigate things like phishing better than storing it yourself?

I'm just saying not saving data is simpler than saving data and avoids the complication. The average user doesn't need 99% of the data that google saves about them and would have no reason to store it themselves. You can have phishing protection and the world class security team while also not saving the unnecessary data resulting in an even more secure model. Protonmail seems to be just as secure without requiring data collection, for example.

Right. If google were just black hats trying to help everyone with their data security, then OK. But, since they aren't, the mere fact that they have the personal data stored to begin with undermines it's security from the moment of storing it.

I had my car stolen last year. If I had found a note left that informed me it is in a secure place, I'm not sure I would have felt any better. And I'm not sure I would appreciate someone expecting me to.

Not as secure as, say, Wikipedia. Personal data is far more secure when it's not stored anywhere at all.

I think the parent meant that they are very vigilant about not giving access to this data to anybody who is not affiliated with Google. Which makes a lot of sense for both business and privacy reasons - you don't want to let others access your valuable assets, and the backlash for leaking out the data usually is much larger than for just having it. Nobody cared about Equifax knowing everything about everyone until it was hacked.

Despite the 15 minutes of outrage-entertainment it provided, it seems no one really cared about Equifax getting hacked either.

Or, more likely, they were simply helpless and realized so from their experience with these sorts of companies.

Companies like Google and Facebook protect user data the way a bank protects its vault.

Google protects the user data from access by others. The data is valuable only if Google alone has access to this data and can sell it as a monopoly premium product.

If everyone had access to the user data the value would be 0.

Of course, Google doesn't give a shit about protecting the privacy of their users, they hoover up all they can and then bunker it.

Haven't you seen wildlife documentaries where, say, lion A protects a zebra carcass (killed or stolen from other predators) from lion B, in order to eat enough of it?

Whatever the case, as someone inside Google, I’d urge you to resist this effort like many of your colleagues did with Project Maven.

Helping the Chinese government consolidate power by censoring information and silencing dissidents (among whatever else they’ll end up doing within the context of this partnership), is a dark road to go down. It will also undoubtedly set a dangerous precedent that will be demanded by like-minded regimes outside China.

I honestly don't understand why censorship is relevant. It's not like Google is going to change how China works, nor should it be in charge of that. Google being there or not has zero impact on how China treats its people, but at least some users may get access to services they find useful. Limited is better than nothing for many, especially Android users.

What DOES matter is Chinese government accessing data Google collects on users. If China takes over the data like with iCloud [0], then that actually puts user's life in danger. My understanding is that they left back then because they couldn't protect users, but they are back because they believe their security is better now.

[0] https://techcrunch.com/2018/07/17/apples-icloud-user-data-in...

> Google is the destroyer of privacy. Google tracks their users at an unprecedented level in the whole history of humanity and if they do this, we now have concrete proof that they don't have values that are above their bottom line.

Sure Google stores a lot of data about me, but why should I be worried? They haven't done anything malicious with it. All user data from Google stays on Google, so how is that any different from storing personal photos on Dropbox?

How do you know it stays with Google?

From Google's Privacy Policy: We provide personal information to our affiliates and other trusted businesses or persons to process it for us, based on our instructions and in compliance with our Privacy Policy and any other appropriate confidentiality and security measures. For example, we use service providers to help us with customer support.

And even without that, if they allow very specific groups of people to be targeted based on very detailed criteria, with very specific ads.. then your data still leaks to unknown 3rd parties, though indirectly.

>Sure Google stores a lot of data about me, but why should I be worried? They haven't done anything malicious with it.

>All user data from Google stays on Google

No, there is no company who cannot be hacked, whether from an insider or an outsider.

Big data is what enabled the operational efficiency of the Holocaust[1]. Imagine the mass scale, micro targeted cyber attacks a bad person could do with a little programming/algorithms knowledge and a data dump of the most detailed psychological/demographical profiles in history on billions of people.

Google and FB are building dual-use tools of mass destruction/manipulation. While they may only use it for advertising, there are plenty of worse things it could be used for. Plain old censorship is just getting your toes wet.

[1]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_and_the_Holocaust

> Now the police dreams that one look at the gigantic map on the office wall should suffice at any given moment to establish who is related to whom and in what degree of intimacy; and, theoretically, this dream is not unrealizable although its technical execution is bound to be somewhat difficult. If this map really did exist, not even memory would stand in the way of the totalitarian claim to domination; such a map might make it possible to obliterate people without any traces, as if they had never existed at all.

-- Hannah Arendt, "The Origins of Totalitarianism"

When people get into re-education camps and are never heard from again.. well, Hannah Arendt again:

> The concentration camps, by making death itself anonymous (making it impossible to find out whether a prisoner is dead or alive), robbed death of its meaning as the end of a fulfilled life. In a sense they took away the individual’s own death, proving that henceforth nothing belonged to him and he belonged to no one. His death merely set a seal on the fact that he had never existed.

And ALL that is required on behalf of the population is to look the other way, to just deny the people who get disappeared is to have blood on one's hands. The excuses people made in the last century are on record, and the excuses we hear today are no better.

It's one thing to feel helpless or be scared, it's one thing to want to, but to not know how -- but to simply look away, and to pat oneself on the back for it! There are a bunch of circles in hell, then there's few hundred circles for nobody, which Dante mistakenly thought to lead nowhere, and then there's a final circle for that.

Thanks for the passages from Arendt - very well selected. But we could do without the histrionics in your final paragraphs. I'm not sure there is anything that could have been done to prevent the world wars and totalitarianism of the 20th century. IMO, there were historical processes at work well beyond any individual's ability to stop. Not a very popular stance, I'm sure, but at least as plausible as your position.

At a very basic level, looking away enables the situations and power structures to come about which then are used to excuse that looking away.

Any individual's act of looking away, is completely within the power of that individual. You can't save your life anyway, nobody can, but only you can kill your soul. You can that "histrionics", I call it a shorthand. Speaking of shorthands,

> IMO, there were historical processes at work well beyond any individual's ability to stop.

These "historical processes" are 100% made up of the acts and failures to act of individuals. When I said "wanting to act but being unable to" that acknowledges that you can't always do much or anything. That's the whole point of even making that distinction, I made a difference between "looking away", and for some reason "being unable or not daring to speak".

But still I don't take the average of what people did, or what people currently do, and call it good as if I was blind and deaf and had no instruments of measurement of my own. A lot of people showed tremendous courage, and saved a lot of lives. Those are the standard to aspire to, not the excuse makers any dark time has. For everybody who had excuses, you'll find someone who risked and endured orders of magnitude more, and didn't want to hear any praise for it.

> These "historical processes" are 100% made up of the acts and failures to act of individuals.

That's obviously false. Trivial example: a volcanic eruption or some other natural catastrophe can change the course of a country's history. You can look at Mount Vesuvius all you want, it won't stop it from erupting.

Modern democracies are in fact the exact opposite of what you are describing. They are not made up of countless individual acts. Politicians ignore most people's opinions, and turn their backs on their own electoral promises once in power. Democracies are gamed so that the lobbies who finance political campaigns wield the real power, and these lobbies represent a tiny sliver of the population composed of very wealthy individuals. They launch their own "grassroots" campaigns to create an illusion of numbers behind them, but they are extremely elitist. Face it: democracy is a sham.

As for saving people: it's human, it's compassionate, it is valuable in itself. Congratulations to those who do it. But historically it changes nothing. History rolls on.

> a volcanic eruption or some other natural catastrophe can change the course of a country's history

Affecting history doesn't make it a "historic process" in the sense we are talking about where people have no choice but to follow along. History isn't something like gravity, it's us recording descriptions of what happened (volcano erupting) and what people did (politics).

> Politicians ignore most people's opinions

Which is an action on their behalf, not some kind of magic force. If people in turn ignored such politicians, many politicians would struggle to find even basic constructive work, and none would enjoy power over others.

> Face it: democracy is a sham.

Face it, that does not excuse looking away. You seem to be saying looking away isn't making a difference anyway, so it's not actually looking away. Or maybe that if someone might lose their life when standing up for themselves or someone else, they do not have the option of standing up. Despite many people having proven that wrong.

And you say even those little acts of courage didn't change history, but how you can even know how much worse it would be without those? I'm not accepting that, even though it's an additional discussion to original point, which is that these acts change all of the history of the person doing or not doing them.

Hitler was a very crazy, very driven person taken over some fourth rate right-wing... club. It's not like history would have created someone similar if Hitler had broken his neck on the way to the first meeting. I mean sure, Europe was pretty fucked up, fascists and communists were being ugly either way, I'm not saying it would have been great, but it's still not like that there is some sort of historic force outside of human actions and humans just "align" with it, and it's not as if history selects or even creates a vessel for something it would "do" anyway.

I'm not trying to put these words in your mouth, but as something that is essential to totalitarianism (this pseudo-scientific view of history and spooky forces greater than the individuals) I just want to drive it home. Nations, corporations, and history don't do shit. People do, and then we cluster and group and view it in abstract ways that are easier to handle, and sometimes useful, but putting the cart before the horse is overdoing it.

> Caution in handling generally accepted opinions that claim to explain whole trends of history is especially important for the historian of modern times, because the last century has produced an abundance of ideologies that pretend to be keys to history but are actually nothing but desperate efforts to escape responsibility.

-- Hannah Arendt

That totalitarianism book is thick, but it's worth it. In an interview 1964 she said:

> When we think of a criminal, we imagine someone with criminal motives. And when we look at Eichmann, he doesn't actually have any criminal motives. Not what is usually understood by "criminal motives." He wanted to go along with the rest. He wanted to say "we," and going-along-with-the-rest and wanting-to-say-we like this were quite enough to make the greatest of all crimes possible. The Hitlers, after all, really aren't the ones who are typical in this kind of situation--they'd be powerless without the support of others.

This is kinda of what "democracy is a sham, history rolls on" means in practice, ultimately. There's a lot of video footage of the Eichmann trial on YouTube last time I checked, it's very depressing. All it takes for a person to lose themselves is to look away, and all it takes for that to happen is to not think. Not think bad things, just don't (really) think. And if it doesn't matter either way, if history just "rolls on", why would one think, especially about not so nice things?

> Well, I think here you point out to one, really, of the basic defects of our system: that the individual citizen has very little possibility of having any influence - of making his opinion felt in the decision-making. And I think that, in itself, leads to a good deal of political lethargy and stupidity. It is true that one has to think first and then to act - but it's also true that if one has no possibility of acting, one's thinking kind of becomes empty and stupid.

-- Erich Fromm ( http://www.hrc.utexas.edu/multimedia/video/2008/wallace/from... )

He totally acknowledges what you say, just like none of what I said implied a denial of it. But that's the starting point, the issue to work on, an issue to exercise agency about, not an excuse for people having no agency. Even if it's just the choice of being tortured to death by Big Brother, or being tortured, agreeing to love Big Brother, and then getting murdered, if you're reading this, you have a lot of choices. Not as many as you deserve, maybe not as many as other people have, but plenty.

> Affecting history doesn't make it a "historic process" in the sense we are talking about where people have no choice but to follow along. History isn't something like gravity, it's us recording descriptions of what happened (volcano erupting) and what people did (politics).

Well, no. "History" is both an academic discipline (humans narrating what happens), and the process of events itself. That process involves a lot of non-human factors, which are deterministic. And human action itself is arguably also deterministic, especially in democracy, because the masses can most certainly be manipulated, and respond quasi-mechanically to mass stimuli.

> Which is an action on their behalf, not some kind of magic force. If people in turn ignored such politicians, many politicians would struggle to find even basic constructive work, and none would enjoy power over others.

But they know people won't take action against them. Why? Because their attention-span, taken as a crowd, is too short. They respond to immediate stimuli, not longer-term phenomena, and to emotion, not reflection. Democracy takes place on Twitter, not in the reading room of the British Museum.

> Nations, corporations, and history don't do shit. People do, and then we cluster and group and view it in abstract ways that are easier to handle, and sometimes useful, but putting the cart before the horse is overdoing it.

Sorry, not buying it. All the classical political theorists agree on this one point, that once you establish democracy, you're catering to the lowest common denominator, and that mass of people is very easy to direct with the right tools (mass education, mass media, mass incarceration,...).

> Hitler was a very crazy, very driven person taken over some fourth rate right-wing... club. It's not like history would have created someone similar if Hitler had broken his neck on the way to the first meeting.

Wrong. Historians agree that Germany got a very raw deal at the Treaty of Versailles, which led inexorably to the Weimar Republic, and therefore a European war of some kind was on the cards from day one. If it hadn't been, France would not have spent two decades building up the Maginot Line. It's Hitler's very mediocrity that best illustrates the strength of the historical forces pushing him along.

> Politicians ignore most people's opinions, and turn their backs on their own electoral promises once in power.

That always happens to a degree, of course, but I find, and IIRC research shows, that politicians generally follow the policies they proclaimed during their campaigns. Certainly I am not surprised by much done by Obama, Trump, May, Merkel, Abe, etc. And those disliked by the public, reflected by low polling, are voted out of office.

Also, we can judge by the enormous sums invested by all sides in persuading and manipulating public opinion that public opinion is highly influential. Finally, democracies have limited government and the rule of law; politicians cannot limit human rights and are subject to the law.

Dropbox cannot cross reference your personal photos with your email, your YouTube preferences, your fetishes extracted from your searches, your purchases, your entire location history, etc.

That said Dropbox is another poor choice for privacy. I'm searching for alternatives, but the alternatives don't seem to be that competent, except for the peer to peer solutions like Resilio Sync and Syncthing. My only consolation at this point, until I settle on an alternative, is that Dropbox isn't Google.

Check out keybase, I've been using it as a Dropbox replacement, and it works pretty well. Its file access on mobile is still in development, as is everything else.

I use Syncthing as a self-hosted Dropbox clone.

There was actually a news story like last week how Dropbox shared the personal contents of people's Dropboxes to researchers (who were researching researchers) without asking for consent to be in the study. So that's actually a really bad example. I switched to Tresorit because of it since it has end-to-end encryption. The lesson is it's not different and you shouldn't trust either party.

It's equally wrong from the moral standpoint to operate in China under CPC as in EU under the Right to be Forgotten and the likes (censorship is censorship). But I'm not sure if avoiding these two markets altogether is a practical strategy given the rise of Chinese tech competitors. It's sad but I think the short period of history during which free speech was celebrated is coming to an end.

Google envies the huge amount of data Baidu enjoys. In this AI/ML age, data is gold. China is the biggest gold mining field. If I were China government, I would block Google for its bluff made/called in 2010.

> That Google took a stand showed they valued freedom of speech above their bottom line,...

And now their bottom line is getting closer to their top line so they re-evaluate these sorts of decisions. From an economics point of view it gives you a nice concrete way to evaluate how how much they value their principles relative to their profitability. Unfortunately you need access to some additional detail which you can't get from outside sources to put an actual number to it.

This logic seems rather strange to me.

If you're unhappy with Google's privacy practices, by all means boycott Google services and cheer for the EU fines. But why would you judge Google's privacy practices any differently depending on whether or not they cooperate with Chinese censorship?

e.g. Why should Google get a free pass for any user privacy malpractices even if they promote freedom of speech on the side?

Conversely, why should Google be penalized more for any user privacy malpractices if they _didn't_ promote freedom of speech on the side?

It's not like a company can be simply judged as "good" or "bad" on a single dimension.

Why should there be a different standard for Google and other tech companies to not expand into China. If we have a problem with how their government works policy should be applied that prevents/manages how businesses subject to our laws operate abroad.

The majority of people don't really care how corporations behave. If they did Google search/gmail/maps would not be so popular. They have the right price point(0$) for people to ignore any moral misgivings they may have. I'm guilty of this and up to my neck in google services

>Why should there be a different standard for Google and other tech companies to not expand into China.

This exactly.

I would even make a stronger case. It's not fair to expect a technology company to fight a major world economic power. This is a failure of US and EU governments. They should pressure China to liberalize their government and provide a level economic playing field (it is insane what China gets away with with respect to the roadblocks it places on Western companies to do business there).

Neither US or EU are the world police. They have no rights and should not have any to pressure any country to push their own idea of how things should work in another country, just like how China and others don't demand such and even if they do that doesn't make it less wrong.

this is a weak argument, as it can be made for literally any situation.

Israel massacring Palestinians? Hey man, they can do whatever they want, we don't have any right to tell them not to and it doesn't make what they're doing any less wrong!

They actually are the world police. Sovereignty, nations, and conflict between them are part of human nature.

If government can’t produce collective action, then market forces will never overcome the prisoners dilemma on its own.

Agree they are not the world police but for EU/US citizens they are our government and should reflect our views and morals. Do we believe in censorship? Do we believe in borderline cheap labor?

I don't have the answers but there are hard questions there, not just for our governments but for us as voters.

> They have no rights and should not have any to pressure any country to push their own idea of how things should work in another country

To believe that China does not attempt to influence other countries is naive. China puts a great deal of pressure on other nations with regard to things like recognition of Taiwan or inviting the Dalai Lama to speak. These have occasionally been in the news over the last few years, e.g. China’s retaliatory measures against Norway for Liu Xiabo winning the Nobel Peace Prize, but in fact they go back decades – when Michelangelo Antonioni was showing his documentary film Chung Kuo around in the early 1970s, in European countries where a screening was organized the local Chinese embassy would raise scandal.

China certainly has a very strong view on the make-up of the region, much is historical, some of it fair. However, we don't see them going around converting everyone to communism. In fact, even all the investment they are doing in Africa right now, very little of the social aspects of china are being exported. Xi Jinping has always maintained: china is not for export.

> In fact, even all the investment they are doing in Africa right now, very little of the social aspects of china are being exported.

China has repeatedly lobbied, with some success now, for East African nations to adopt its "Great Firewall" network infrastructure.

Don't forget the pressure on Marriott to fire an employee for clicking 'like' on a Tibet-related topic.

And for pressuring airlines not to list Taiwan on their websites for booking.

> Neither US or EU are the world police

If an American pays a Chinese businessman in China a bribe, that's an FCPA [1] violation. If the U.S. government wanted to prevent American technology companies from helping China's dictator build a modern dystopia, it would have precedent.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_Corrupt_Practices_Act

The US and EU have (relatively) free markets where Chinese companies can compete. But not the other way. They can simply stop trading with China unless China opens their market as well.

I think that point would have some merit if US, EU and China worked completely in isolation at every level. Let everybody sort their mess like they want. But clearly that's not the case, China's economy is very tightly linked to ours, as such the way we trade with them influences their internal politics. When a US or EU company moves production to China it's not politically neutral, this company implicitly endorses the Chinese political system. As such I don't see why we couldn't regulate these things to suit our principles and interests.

It's not about saying "stop censoring the internet or we'll nuke you", it's about saying "if you want to do business with us we demand that you meet these standards, otherwise no biggy, we'll just go elsewhere."

And China does attempt to do the same thing, for instance in many African countries. It's less obvious because they're still ramping up their diplomacy, US and EU have a huge headstart there.

Would you apply the same policy to countries with worse human-rights violations, like North Korea?

You make it look like google would starve without China. Like they have to go there and participate. Shifting the blame for your lack of ethics onto some government is ridiculous in this context. My god...where is your shame?

>My god...where is your shame?

Do you have no sense of your own hypocrisy? I am certain you have 0 qualms in using and buying Chinese manufactured products, or buying services and products from companies that operate in China. And yet here we are with you lecturing from your soapbox on who should be or shouldn't be ashamed of their actions. Look to yourself first before moralizing at others.

There is a difference between not having a choice and openly advertising and justifying unethical behavior. The fact that this is the only sentence you've touched speaks for itself.

>There is a difference between not having a choice

You have no choice?

>and justifying unethical behavior.

I get it. It's not unethical when you engage in commerce with a regime you find unethical, or when you buy from all the other companies that manufacture their goods in China ... but it's unethical if Google doesn't want to ignore 1.4 billion people?

>The fact that this is the only sentence you've touched speaks for itself.

As opposed to the other three snide and arrogant sentences? If you'd like a good-faith discussion please lead by example.

> It's not unethical when you engage in commerce with a regime you find unethical or when you buy from all the other companies that manufacture their goods in China

Who says it's not unethical? Why are you putting words in peoples' mouths?

On one hand you talk about having a good-faith discussion but then you go ahead and base your argument off of words you've put in someone else's mouth.

> but it's unethical if Google doesn't want to ignore 1.4 billion people?

Most people find corruption of data far worse than the absence of data. I'd rather not be told anything than be told a lie.

>Who says it's not unethical? Why are you putting words in peoples' mouths?

OK. I guess I made the reasonable assumption that buying Chinese goods or buying goods from companies that do business in Chinese is not intrinsically unethical since it is something is completely pervasive. The fact that neither the public, nor democratic governments, nor any companies have any qualms

So I'm sorry if I stumbled upon a hypocrite who hates himself for engaging in the unethical action of living in a modern globalized society.

>On one hand you talk about having a good-faith discussion

I sure do and still do. You tell me, was OP's first comment a good-faith start to a discussion? If not, why are you hassling me? Because you agree with OP - that's the standard here?

>Most people find corruption of data far worse than the absence of data.

Got stats for that? Or are we projecting how we feel on the rest of the world.

But to rephrase it, do you think Chinese citizens should have the option to use the same products that their peers in other countries do? The actual point I made however had a different focus, mainly - do you think a company who competes with other companies can just ignore a market of 1.4 billion people when none of their other competitors do? Companies go bankrupt all the time. Even a multinational Fortune 100 company will have a life expectancy of 40-50 years. So the entire point was: - No western government hasn't taken steps to isolate this 'unethical' regime. - The public is perfectly fine with travelling to China, buying from China, doing business with companies who do business in China. - All of Google's competitors are in China.

But Google is evil because they only lasted 8 years of their self-imposed exile (and if you remember, their leaving China was precipitated by Chinese hacking attack against their servers).

> You have no choice?

Turn your mouse around. Where is it made? This is true since it was a joke in the 90s.

> I get it. It's not unethical when you engage in commerce with a regime you find unethical, or when you buy from all the other companies that manufacture their goods in China ... but it's unethical if Google doesn't want to ignore 1.4 billion people?

I never said it's not unethical. You say that I say that. Which is quite weak. I hope this is the result of you realizing what you did and now trying to dig yourself out by shifting blame to others.

I don’t understand your logic.

A company making toothbrush is different from a company helps censorship.

The point is what a company does, not where it operates.

And people in this thread make it sound that without Google, China would be this free and uncensored country. The reality is that all search engines are already censored, so one more has little impact. Google's job isn't to decide how China works, it's to provide value to users, and by almost all definitions, this move will provide a non-negative impact.

You’re an immoral and evil person. Anyone who makes excuses for the powerful restricting the rights of people with limited power is a horrible human being. You should be absolutely ashamed of yourself.

We've banned this account for egregiously violating the site guidelines with this comment and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17661668. You can't post this way, regardless of how right you are or feel. We all know what the online shaming culture leads to, and we don't want that here.

If you don't want to be banned on HN, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. Those are at https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.

What people here don't understand is that the talk about censorship is of less than secondary importance there.

China's priority here is totally not to censor them, it is to conduct the "handshaking ritual" and have them becoming subject under China's "law." A "blood pack" - making them partners in crime.

The same was with Yahoo. They came to China talking only about "search," but got asked about "personal data of all China's opposition members residing in US." Not only they gave everything to China, but put extreme effort to cover their "special relationship" with China's ministry of interior.

In this light, please take a look at very, very close relationship Google tried to establish with Russian government in period of 2005-2010. We are talking about nothing less than first person accounts of people involved certifying that Google was sending all kinds of "consultants" to Russian political establishment, training them in online campaigning. Simultaneously, pages of Russian political opposition did disappear in Google's search. In light of recent events, this should be subject to much scrutiny.

P.S. : Additional comment on Google. At some moment they snapped after all. They closed their Russian development centre, and evacuated key personnel to Switzerland in unprecedented visa deal with government of Zurich.

P.P.S. : On person whom Sundar Pichay was meeting. I read name Wang Huning in the article, and instantly I felt that something "clicked." The name was familiar. Wang Huning is the man who is the real propaganda chief in the communist party. To know more of his view of USA, please read his work titled "America against America." I will not be surprised at all if he is the man entrusted with running their stratagems targeting USA.

very interesting. can you provide me with some sources to learn more?

this is potentially the corruption story of the century

>very interesting. can you provide me with some sources to learn more?

There was a minor intern in Russian presidential administration. Nicknamed "rLode" in the Internets. I happened to knew him as I attended language courses ran by high school he was attending.

He held his home page there "http://rlode.narod.ru/main.html" a man of unconcealed, borderline rabid views on social class. If you ever unearth an archived version of the page, I guarantee you will have some fun time reading it. If you dig further, finding his offline contacts are not hard.

Second was a Far Eastern strongman nicknamed "Twix" or "Nuts," man running arms trade in the Far East. How he came upon the info, I didn't know. Just assume that being a "big man" in Russia involves having lots of ears. I think you still can find him making appearances online on Russian .onion arms sales sites under different Japanese cartoons themed pseudonyms.

As for people of Google's side, ask any man relocated from Moscow to Zurich. Few people I knew there voiced their extreme surprise with their relocation coming unannounced, and being done with near military level of coordination. Officials were an everyday sight in their office on Balchug street. Just the fact that their office was on an island just a river across from Kremlin tells a lot. Nobody pays a ennormous premium to have office in this special place without having "being close to Kremlin" factor in mind.

On Wang, I once read the very few English translation of 半月谈 with some excerpts from his works. I never read the complete book. But the general theme is him telling party members to not to fear the USA as it is a frustrated, insecure, diseased society - something that has not to be feared, but taken advantage of. His main discontent with USA is it spreading that "plague" around the world. Following, it is CCPs role as "a global messiah" (oh my....) to rectify that, showing world "a different vision of a successful state system."

Is the book available in English? I could only find passing references in news articles, but not the actual book.

I think no, I also tried to look for a complete translation.

Do you remember the "Don't Be Evil" campaign? Google literally rose to prominence with this as their slogan. I would expect a company whose slogan is "Don't Be Evil" to completely shun a country who wants censored search.

I thought Google performed censorship in North America too. After Trump's election people were crying for more censorship on facebook and Google.

I think they censor everywhere to a certain extent, this seems more like a concerted effort along the lines of, "what are we going to allow them to view" and not "should we remove the child porn links and isis videos and pirated movie links now that we know about them"

You would? Google is private company. If you want a powerful entity to live up to your standards, you should look into creating a government. I recommend a democracy; and hold your neighbors accountable for treating it as their own. Together, you can eventually build something to be proud of. It will probably never be perfect, but it will be yours for as long as you take care of it.

It was their standard, Eric Schmidt stood on many stages and said the same. Google being a private company has no bearing on my previous comment. Private companies don't have to be amoral. A much more capitalistic move would be to use their information and computation power to devalue the Yuan and acquire large swathes of the now defunct China and rename it Google. Now, not only can you search Google you can go to Google. This would be much more valuable than some pleb ad revenue.

Funny you should mention that --

https://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-dont-be-evil/2540...

That article is written very strangely. The middle of the article talks about how people mistakenly believe the motto was removed entirely, but a reader who only read the title and first couple paragraphs of their article would likely come away with the same mistaken belief.

They're entirely truthful. It's just oddly structured.

https://www.ownagepranks.com

Following local laws does not imply you approve of it. That's like saying, if your company has business in a country that doesn't allow same-sex marriage, you as a company are against same-sex marriage too.

They don't make the law, neither should they. It's not Google's job to decide how China runs its country. And offering legitimate users legitimate service is neither immoral nor greedy.

The majority of Chinese people would much rather have a limited set of services than no services at all. They already do live with dozens of censored search engines, so one more makes no difference to them. Google isn't making their life any worse, but rather providing them services they didn't have before. How is that "evil"?

Your first comparison is pretty much a poorly formed Straw man, shame on you. It's doing business with an immoral government, Google and every other business that helps China (Saudi, etc. insert country here) censor the internet is just as immoral as those who ask them to do the censoring. Simply because other companies do it and the ignorant people are 'ok' with it does not mean they get a moral pass. They enable an oppressive government simply for more ad revenue. It's evil because those in control will use it as a tool to spy on and manipulate the population, I know I know, this goes on everywhere. But again, this is the company whose slogan was "Don't be evil". Restricting the information that the population has access to is the first step in hiding information that might cause the readers to question the authoritarians legitimacy. See manipulation vs. persuasion, https://aeon.co/ideas/how-to-tell-the-difference-between-per..., China seeks to hide relevant information that would likely cause the readers to change their opinion of the leaders. What would happen if the entire country could read about Tienanmen Square, identify the military personnel that would have been in charge of those troops, then attempt to track familial wealth and document any misdeeds the perps did before the event and after? This is likely a situation they hope to avoid, not hiding porn or rap videos, they want the population to have no access to information that will help them research the government and its institutions. Why are you so passionate about this being ok? Reading your comments you seem like a shill for google. What information do you think they want to hide, what exactly will be censored, that will tell us their intentions. Looking forward to your response.

>Your first comparison is pretty much a poorly formed Straw man, shame on you.

What is with this shaming? OP made a cogent, reasoned point. I don't necessarily agree, but it's not 'shameful'.

It was shameful since the OP dropped an irrelevant straw man hand grenade into the conversation.

Buying tooth brushes or power tools from China may not be ideal, but it is no where near as bad as helping the Chinese goverment oppress its people by contributing to limiting their people's access to information. For a dollar.

Next thing you know, Google might do something really bad, like helping the US Army with some AI research. zOMG!

Why not both?

- American companies stop facilitating totalitarian regimes

- World governments also prompt totalitarian regimes to move towards democracy

I'd like to reply to pravebeatle anyway: I disagree with them, but they're polite and follow the HN guidelines, and their reply doesn't deserve to be flagged.

I know what you're saying - there's a lot of instability in the world and sometimes people make very poor choices - but democracy is a way to better handle the turbulence.

In essence, it gives us the ability to handle the coup that occurs every few years in unstable environments with less bloodshed - rather than the military taking control and ousting a leader, and a bunch of people dying or being imprisoned, another party takes over at the ballot box.

The newly elected ruler might be a really bad choice, but it's the people's perjorative to choose their leaders and it's a much better alternative than another coup.

> Why not both?

By definition, “companies” are incentivized to prioritize capital pursuit over moral pursuit. It’s actually the most fundamental part of the whole concept.

Many democratic governments in the world, and particularly the most wealthy and powerful ones, are run by people who are (to a large unmeasurable extent) incentivized to do what companies want them to do. This is not a fundamental concept of a democratic government, but as long as the electorate fails to take responsibility for their own government’s behavior, the incentives remain in the company’s favor, which doesn’t make a very good case for democracy.

Democracy is a very slippery concept. America, for example, is well understood to not be a democracy, but it’s people seem to have convinced themselves it is. These kinds of miscalculations are really at the root of “why not”.

> By definition, “companies” are incentivized to prioritize capital pursuit over moral pursuit. It’s actually the most fundamental part of the whole concept.

Indeed. But if it's most reasonable economically, for a company to pay someone to dump their taxic waste into the sea, that doesn't mean it is morally OK to do so.

> Many democratic governments in the world, and particularly the most wealthy and powerful ones, are run by people who are (to a large unmeasurable extent) incentivized to do so what companies want them to do.

Yes. Lobbyists exist. They are bad. Lobbyists are bad because the undermine democracy. Democracy is not bad because of lobbyists.

> But if it's most reasonable economically, for a company to pay someone to dump their taxic waste into the sea, that doesn't mean it is morally OK to do so.

True, but what are you getting at? It has happened and it does happen. The fact that it isn't morally OK doesn't change the facts on the ground. It's like the bicyclist complaining that he had the right of way vs. a car that hits him.

Oh, I thought it was obvious. Much in the same way we disincentivize waste dumping, or bad drivers, we can disincentivize working for totalitarian regimes.

And why should they do that?

What was the last time Western interventionism brought any good for the world? Who are the US and EU representing to tell other countries how to live their lives??

Right. If the US is representing anybody, it’s Google.

For the Americans who want your government to represent you, you’ve got some work to do. Most Americans I know speak of their government as though it were just some poorly run business that somebody else is responsible for. Get your own house in order before you criticize others peoples’.

get out of your echo chamber and speak to more Americans

He's on HN. It's an American-centric site.

The Korean War ended up benefitting South Korea in the sense that they didn’t up like North Korea. The free trade agreements have largely been responsible for large numbers of the world's population improving their living standard. There are other examples of intervention being good. Of course there are lots of examples of intervention being bad.

There is nothing special about Western intervention vs. intervention by other regional powers. Nations with power rarely use it for the well being of the world. But shouldn’t one strive to have governments do what you consider to be right?

>The Korean War ended up benefitting South Korea in the sense that they didn’t up like North Korea

This is an incorrect understanding of Korean history. US anti-communist policy played no small part in creating North Korea in the first place.

In the postwar period, US support for the right-wing dictator Syngman Rhee, who murdered tens of thousands of Korean citizens he suspected were his political opponents, empowered and drew popular support to Kim Il-Sung. Sung was further bolstered by the US giving favored status to Japan over Korea, forcing them, for example, to purchase goods and expertise from their brutal, former colonial rulers. With this state of affairs, Sung, a former anti-Japanese resistance fighter, was successful in persuading many that that the US-backed rule of Rhee was just an extension of the pre-War colonial rule, ultimately devolving into the never-ending civil war we have today.

This in no way benefitted the south, but instead has been a nearly 70 year long drag on their economy, as well as their development into a liberal democracy (which really didn’t happen until a popular revolt in the 80s because the continued US to provide financing and support to authoritarian rulers in the south).

I think it is undeniable that Sung would, with Chinese and Soviet help, would have revolted against anyone who was in power at the time. Regardless of US actions. (The Sino-Soviet split occurred later.) Without US backing Sung would have won and Korea would be much worse off now. At least as I see things.

> What was the last time Western interventionism brought any good for the world?

WWI, WWII, Gulf War (1990), Kosovo (1999)?

Doesn't Germany sit firmly in the Western world?

Japan doesn't.

>Who are the US and EU representing to tell other countries how to live their lives??

Chinese companies have much more freedom when conducting business in America and EU than American and EU companies do in China. It is perfectly acceptable for America and EU to stand-up to China on this point.

>What was the last time Western interventionism brought any good for the world?

You're kidding right? WW2, Korean War, Kosovo. Harder is to prove all the wars that never happened because of American enforced good behaviour (without a strong superpower at the helm, you think there wouldn't be full-scale regional wars all over the globe? What would stop some regional tinpot dictator from invading their neighbour).

And then of course, the growth of democracy itself. Do you think it's a coincidence that America's reign as the most powerful and prosperous nation just so happen to coincide with the global growth of democracies? I mean, when there were two superpowers, a market-based democracy and a communist oligarchy, the world largely divided themselves along those systems of government and economics. Before WW2, even Europe wasn't really the democratic heaven it is now, as many of its constituent nations were either fascist or communist dictatorships.

Remember when Ebola was going to kill us all?

https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2014/10/the-us-...

> It's not fair to expect a technology company to fight a major world economic power. This is a failure of US and EU governments.

Okay, so if the US and EU governments would announce tomorrow that they will start a trade war with China and stop US/EU companies from trading with China unless China immediately stops all censorship/human rights abuses, would Google/other tech companies go along with that, or will they lobby against that move?

The tech companies are not as innocent or blameless as you portray them to be.

> It's not fair to expect a technology company to fight a major world economic power

Google fights major world powers every day [1, 2].

And Google doesn't have to fight to force the Chinese government to stop censoring their citizens.

Google can simply choose not to partner with repressive regimes in enabling and legitimizing censorship and mass surveillance.

[1] https://transparencyreport.google.com/user-data/overview

[2] https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/technology/google-en...

>Google fights major world powers every day

That's right, if by 'fight' you mean following rules laid out in countries that it operates in. If the rules are completely skewed against them (and other foreign companies) as they are in China, they have no recourse other than to appeal to their government to lobby on their behalf.

Facebook is in a similar position with respect to Russian interference. The narrative pushed by people like Kara Swisher of Recode is that Facebook should have fought a major world power with limitless resources for cyber attacks and because they didn't they are responsible for the damage, instead of demanding to know why the previous and present American administrations allowed an American company and public be harassed by a belligerent foreign power.

>Google can simply choose not to partner with repressive regimes in enabling and legitimizing censorship and mass surveillance.

And you can choose not to buy Chinese-made products and thereby no longer support and legitimize a repressive regime ... but hey, here we are.

> following rules laid out in countries that it operates in

Exactly my point. Google can choose not to operate in countries where the rules are too egregiously antithetical to their mission.

> Facebook should have fought a major world power

Facebook is responsible for the damage because Facebook built the tools that enabled bad actors to hack democracies and Facebook profited from it (in the short term).

Google is in a similar position. Should they build the tools that enable systematic repression and profit from it?

Sure, they can claim they're "only following orders" but when has that ever worked out well?

>Google can choose not to operate in countries where the rules are too egregiously antithetical to their mission.

I'm all about fairness. Right now, Chinese companies have way more freedom in how they operate in West, than Western companies have in China. All I argued is that is fair for Western governments to put pressure and stand-up for fairness.

>Facebook is responsible for the damage because Facebook built the tools that enabled bad actors to hack democracies and Facebook profited from it (in the short term)

Yeah. They really dropped the ball on that one eh .. how could they have not foreseen being targeted by a major world power with limitless military, cyber and espionage resources. Are you nuts? Tech companies building photo-sharing social networks for grandma should not be left to deal with blatant attacks from belligerent world powers. Defense is the primary function of the nation state, not Facebook!

>ure, they can claim they're "only following orders" but when has that ever worked out well?

What are you talking about? What orders?

The very notion of independent sovereignty of nations means that you can't and shouldn't expect to normalize behavior between countries.

If doing business in the USA is free & good, many outsider businesses will do business there as well. If doing business in China is not all free & good, outsider business won't do business there. How much that hurts foreign businesses vs hurts China is up for debate. But governments individually rule what goes on in their borders, and use those rules both for internal ideological pursuit as well as to attract or detract external interest, as is their role.

"Fairness" of doing business isn't exactly extreme human rights violations or anything. (Other behaviors are, but not this particular point you're making.)

Are you just asking why anyone should have any ethical standards at all?

Presumably even you think there is some line a tech company shouldn't cross, right?

Absolutely there are lines companies should not cross but that's what we have laws and policy for. That's why we have GDPR/AML/Anti-Bribery/Anti-Corruption legislation. We all know they are wrong but we still have laws even if some of practices are accepted locally, small bribes etc.

Contrived example, if a printing company wanted to expand into China they would not be allowed print anti Chinese government documents. Would we be as up in arms about this or should there be a law saying that until China increases human rightsn EU/US companies can't work there and Chinese companies can't work/sell to EU/US?

Obviously this won't/can't happen given our dependence on cheap Chinese manufacturing and our need for year on year growth.

So if it's not illegal, in your book, a company should just do it?

Let's say Saudi Arabia approaches Facebook and wants access to profile and location data to help round up all the gay people in the country to be executed. Maybe they even offer to pay a lot of money, so it'll be profitable.

That's fine with you? Those local laws, amirite?

You mean like "do no evil"?

I have absolutely no faith at all that any large company can really stick to some moral compass. Eventually money corrupts all. Any individual morality and sense of responsibility gets diluted to the point where it disappears completely.

I mean, let's take your reasoning to its logical conclusion: I think most would agree that not paying taxes isn't very ethical, does it mean that we shouldn't have any laws and regulations and controlling bodies surrounding these topics because it's a line "a tech company shouldn't cross"?

If you don't put a cop on the line and there's money on the other side I can assure you that it will be crossed. Raising outrage at the company is not an effective way to enforce the law (although it can work at times).

> we shouldn't have any laws and regulations and controlling bodies surrounding these topics because it's a line "a tech company shouldn't cross"?

What? No, it means that we shouldn't shrug off bad corporate behavior and say oh well, I guess tax avoidance was good for their quarterly profits.

Raising outrage is an important check on corporate behavior, even moreso in a place like HN, where employers like Google hope to recruit employees.

I see what you mean but I sort of disagree, the problem with outrage-based policing is that it's extremely variable and in this day of social medial it's also very easy to manipulate and instrumentalize. In particular outrage works well for punctual, symbolic acts, not for long trends. See basically anything regarding the alt-right.

I'm not saying that you shouldn't be outraged and voice it, I'm saying that for something as large and intricate as our economical and political relashionship with China you can't really expect it to achieve much. The consequences of outrage should be to change laws and regulations to make sure that it never happens again, not Google saying "oh sorry, I won't do it (this time)".

eh.... I think I agree in principle with you, BUT something doesn't sit quite right. I'm currently in China (hence the throwaway account) and I think any level of collaboration with their government on restricting access to free information for the Chinese people should ABSOLUTELY BE CHALLENGED. Not doing so prolongs their government's ability to not reform vs getting caught in middle-income trap from lack of 0 to 1 innovation.

>I think any level of collaboration with their government on restricting access to free information for the Chinese people should ABSOLUTELY BE CHALLENGED

I don't think that's the parent point, it's more that if you do consider that doing business with the Chinese state is unethical then it makes more sense to push for regulation rather than expect big multinational companies to Do The Right Thing. Right now it seems that we're in a race to the bottom and the Chinese government is making the rules.

> it makes more sense to push for regulation rather than expect big multinational companies to Do The Right Thing

How does it make more sense? You can't influence foreign policy of your government and you won't find a party with such specific topics which is also powerful enough to actually accomplish something.

With a company like google you can create a shitstorm that will cost them. You can break a companies reputation with a hand full influencers those days.

PS. a company is not a robot (we'd even expect ethics from them). It consists of humans and we should expect acting ethical from a human. They don't get a license to kill the moment they enter their office.

This is the key comment for me. A person in China has an opinion that does not agree with the government and feels so threatened voicing an opinion that would't merit a second thought in the EU/US that they have to go anonymous.

How can we be comfortable with google or any company going to China and effectively saying yup, thats ok.

Yes, because he's in a foreign country and potentially breaking their rules. He should wait and post when you're back.

"Don't be evil"

if you marketed yourself in such a way, you shouldn't be surprised if the general public applies different standards to you.

When I read that line I though it read for a second "Don't be evil ;-)"

Almost all countries require compliance with some level of government mandated censorship. Why is China being singled out? Many western and middle eastern countries that tech companies operate in today have severe censorship and monitoring requirements. Some of these countries with have similar or worse human rights records. You hear very little if any uproar about it.

> Almost all countries require compliance with some level of government mandated censorship. Why is China being singled out?

Because the purpose and intent of the censorship matters. China's censorship is about suppressing dissent against a human-rights violating authoritarian regime. Western censorship is about suppressing harmful crimes like child abuse and sometimes intellectual property violations. Those goals are not comparable.

Also, China is massively powerful and influential. Many of the countries with similarly strict censorship regimes are so small and weak that they'll never attract the same kind of attention.

> Why should there be a different standard for Google and other tech companies to not expand into China. If we have a problem with how their government works policy should be applied that prevents/manages how businesses subject to our laws operate abroad.

they set that standard for themselves...

No.

- Most people care a lot how corporations behave. Many corporations have a very, very bad reputation and it affects their business. E.G: I know more than one person who deleted their facebook.

- Google got its popularity by indicating it was not a standard corporation ("Don't be evil" and acting on it). Google is free to sell that away, but if it does it loses a hard-to-quantify place in our idealistic hearts.

- Maybe you're right, maybe we should hold other tech companies to a higher standard too.

- The US Gov has no effective means to change the structure of China's government. It also cares more about trade and stability than the freedom of China's population.

That's a straw man which conflates Google with the regulations it is proposing to follow.

Google wants to do business in China; and it does so by obeying Chinese regulations. It obeys the law. End of story.

If you want to change it, lobby the PRC.

No it doesn't.

The regulations in China are immoral. Obeying immoral laws is also immoral. (If the law says 'gas the [ethnic group]' it is still wrong to do it).

If Google must follow immoral laws to operate in China, they should not operate in China.

I don't have any pull with the PRC but I can boycott Google.

It sounds like you might be missing a few things. Private companies are, by definition, private entities responsible for prioritizing whatever and however they choose.

If you want to have input in a powerful entity, I really recommend starting a government. If you have an old one layout around, maybe dust if off and use that, but it’ll probably take some work.

I don’t know where you live, but in the US, there’s a bunch of people who are interested in reviving their government entity. They can’t do it alone, though. Here’s the website:

https://www.dsausa.org

I as a private individual take responsibility for what companies I do business with, and what those companies do. A company claiming an imperative to stockholders does not excuse me, by my own personal moral standard, from investing in such a company.

Also, I'm sure a number of google employees, and the population in general feel this way. When their engineers have to answer for building the mental handcuffs for China, it may not quite be the bragging right it once was.

Private companies are ultimately run by people. People who make moral and ethical decisions every day.

Using a private company to earn an income and then saying "I can't do anything about [bad thing company is doing], companies are by their nature amoral profit chasing beasts" is moral cowardice.

If you work for or with that evil entity, you can do something about it. That it would impact your comfortable lifestyle is not really relevant to the moral calculus.

The only thing that will make things better is many people individually doing the right thing.

> The regulations in China are immoral. Obeying immoral laws is also immoral.

The real world isn't black & white like that. By operating in China, Google isn't making _less_ information available to the average Chinese internet user, since Baidu, Bing etc are already censored anyway. If anything, it will likely be a net win in terms of access to information and user experience as we'd finally see some meaningful competition to Baidu.

The "do no evil" bit might have been endearing to some geeks, but Google won on search quality. I only see sporadic support for something like Duck Duck Go which markets itself as the privacy conscious alternative

In USA, they obey the copyright laws (often described as draconian, with major companies getting copyright extensions again and again, e.g. Disney) and allow DMCA to suppress this information.

In Europe, they obey the "right to be forgotten".

Wrong. If China becomes a big business unit for Google then China can use that leverage to start influencing Google’s international operations. We already see China doing this with other companies.

>Why should there be a different standard for Google and other tech companies to not expand into China

there is no different standard. it is unethical to aid totalitarian states in their oppression of their people.

that standard is crystal clear, and google is on the wrong side of it.

waffling regarding corporate responsibility is irrelevant because the question of whether the actor is a corporation or not has nothing to do with the standard itself. once again: the moral issue is very clear on what is acceptable and what is not acceptable.

selling widgets to the chinese is not in violation of that standard. offering a product that is neutered so as to be a tool of oppression is in clear violation of the standard.

the question of china using these tools to oppress their population is not up for debate. china is a police state. for ethnic minorities like the uighurs, the falun gong, the chinese muslims, etc, that police state is operationalized to eradicate and prevent any presence in society.

this is not right. it is not right to help the chinese state keep groups of people subjugated and starving.

the apologists should be ashamed. google should be ashamed. google employees should be ashamed, and outraged.

> Why should there be a different standard for Google

Because Google "is not a conventional company" [1].

A tired trope on HN is that corporations cannot and should not be ethical entities. They are legally mandated to maximize shareholder value, and this usually requires taking actions that people find morally repugnant.

This is a myth and it is horseshit.

Google's mission is to "organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful" [2]. Larry and Sergey knew that realizing its mission requires a long-term focus and a moral center that is unusual for modern corporations.

The public must trust Google to do the right thing even when it's not in Google's short-term interest.

Organic search results skewed by ad payments or censorship is antithetical to Google's mission.

Of course they could make huge short-term profits by compromising the quality and completeness of information, but they've wisely fought against this from the beginning.

This is a rational strategy to maximize the long-term value of the company, and it's worked incredibly well [3].

It would be a crying shame to stop now.

[1] https://abc.xyz/investor/founders-letters/2004/ipo-letter.ht...

[2] https://www.google.com/about/our-company/

[3] https://imgur.com/a/LfuM4eQ

From an outsider perspective who does not know much about what has or is going on at Google, I was always under the impression that Sergey was the main "don't be evil" guy.

Could this development be a sign that some of the power of the founders is diminishing within Google and has transferred to e.g. major shareholders?

Maybe I worded it badly, I meant why should manufacturing companies be allowed into china with no fanfare but google be ostracized for doing the same.

If what they are doing is legal so be it, what we want to be legal is the real question. Should we be doing business with countries that don't have the same beliefs that we do? The other side is that encouraging companies like google into China could help in the long run.

> This is a myth and it is horseshit.

Exactly. As for an example of a company showing some backbone...

https://www.macobserver.com/tmo/article/tim-cook-soundly-rej...:

"When we work on making our devices accessible by the blind," he said, "I don't consider the bloody ROI." He said that the same thing about environmental issues, worker safety, and other areas where Apple is a leader.

He didn't stop there, however, as he looked directly at the NCPPR representative and said,

"If you want me to do things only for ROI reasons, you should get out of this stock."

(of course, Apple does do business in China and practices app censorship there, so...)

How does refraining from providing any search access whatsoever to a country with a population of 1.4 billion fit the mission of "organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful?"

One would assume it implies offering services to people in China is a goal. Perhaps "do the right thing" is open to interpretation.

> Organic search results skewed by ad payments or censorship is antithetical to Google's mission.

Has Google's policy of blocking images of pedophilia from search results in countries where the laws and morals of the country forbid those images compromised its mission? Or is there room in the mission for the nuance that different people have different common standards?

Because it will degrade democracy in countries like India. They will implement this censored version in a jiff. Government rules and laws can always change, this project means they will never change towards the better and not allow people to rake in the freedom that democracy implements. This project is certain to weaken democracy all around.

That US excetioptonalism should be put into bed, better for good. With all that happens in US, why would any American companies would assume they still have a moral high ground to demand things?

> The majority of people don't really care how corporations behave.

This is not true, people care, but not enough to make them stay away from Google. Violating privacy is not that high on most people's mind. If we knew, for example, that Google search engine uses child slave labour, a lot of people would stay away from it. But if it's just remembers what you searched for, most people kinda care, but not enough to inconvenience themselves by using something else. It's not binary, it's a spectrum. And new developments move people's opinions along this spectrum.

Exactly - Microsoft (Bing, Office 365, Hotmail, OneDrive etc) has been operating in China forever, and Bing cooperates with state censorship just as you'd expect. But the minute Google does the same thing, everyone loses their minds.

Is this because of expectations (i.e. no one expected MS to hold the moral high ground, but Google was famous for its "Do no evil" mantra)? In which case, well, maybe Google's branding backfired in this case :-/

Don't forget Apple, and they do far worse:

https://techcrunch.com/2018/07/17/apples-icloud-user-data-in...

The hypocrisy of western activist types on this issue is astounding. One week, they demand that tech companies across the US censor what they find "harmful", but the next week, they condemn the Chinese for doing exactly the same thing for content they find "harmful".

Either you're in favor of free speech or you're just partial about which content you want to censor. The activist crowd in the west lost all moral standing on this subject years ago.

That entitlement of self-righteous is jarring. They need to have some awareness/consciousness what is happening around the world. They are losing, power talks, value is overrated.

Another explanation of course would be that "activists" is not a homogenous group, and that different people might be calling for different things.

I think there is an important distinction to be made.

Censorship that is meant to block all criticism of the current rulers to keep them in power forever is unlike all other kinds of censorship because it is self-referential and self-reinforcing.

If a government censors, say, sites that distribute pirated movies or sites that glamorise suicide, I can still protest against that ban or campaign to get a different government elected.

But if a government censors both those sites and my criticism of the ban, then that is a wholly different kind of censorship.

Making that distinction is not hypocrisy.

Any censorship is almost be definition self-reinforcing. If you censor something, there's less of it and the ideas that aren't censored proliferate more, getting stronger.

In that sense, censoring criticism of rulers in general is doubly self-reinforcing.

It reinforces the specific laws and rules they make and it reinforces obedience, lack of critical thinking and intransparency of the censorship decisions themselves.

I don't see how anyone could deny that censoring political opposition in general acts on a meta level and is therefore categorically different from all other stuff that gets censored.

I find it useful to ignore the value of consistency when considering people's actions holistically. Otherwise you'll never get anywhere when trying to determine what people really want.

I suggest this if only for practicality sake, as only fanatics are completely consistent with some set of edicts/ethics/beliefs/ So you need to be able to communicate and reason with people who are inconsistent.

People are generally consistent: it's just that their true beliefs are seldom what they espouse.

As the old saying goes, behind every double standard is an unstated single standard.

Without devolving into a semantic debate, I would argue that people are consistent with their desired outcomes, but decidedly inconsistent with the means of which they achieve their outcomes.

The unstated single standard for the vast majority is "whatever works out best for me."

Google isn't really in favor of free speech, they fired James Damore for stating quite mild facts that are quite known among clinical psychologists.

Hypothesis: some "mild facts" are legally considered "harmful, discriminatory, and disruptive." These two things can both be true, but if they are, companies might still be obligated to minimize a harmful, discriminatory, and disruptive workplace.

https://www.theverge.com/2018/2/16/17021714/james-damore-goo...

Well I believe Google is in the right to fire him. But what I found most embarrassing is most people who I'd imagine to mostly liberal and reasonable behaved like he said something so vile that he must be censored across all news media.

> some "mild facts" are legally considered "harmful, discriminatory, and disruptive."

What? I thought the argument from the other end was always to deny these were facts. You are saying, yes, they are facts. But they are too volatile so we won't examine them?

I'm using the quotation marks to indicate quoted opinions.

The difference between the two opinions that is significant: one is an opinion in a legal ruling and therefore carries force of law.

they fired Damore, because he was pushing an agenda. he presented those 'mild facts' selectively and then used the selection to argue for something bigger that is very questionable/false, i.e. that women have no place at top STEM positions

I think there are two things to say. The first is that you aren’t comparing like for like. In the Chinese case, the Chinese government gets to choose what is censored and any search engine has to censor the same things, whereas in the US it would presumably be Google that gets to decide what to censor and so someone could conceivably go to another search engine to avoid it.

It’s also worth noting that even if search results are censored, in the US model the websites can still be accessed (although US-based illegal websites can get shut down), whereas in the Chinese model the websites themselves are banned.

The second is that even if one were to accept that the models are similar, that doesn’t mean that google has to have both or have none. It could take any stance on what level of censorship (or pushing down in search rankings) is acceptable in what cases and choose what to do based on that.

For example google already tries to remove spam that tries to gain its rankings but I don’t see people complaining that Google’s rankings unfairly penalise these sites and suppress their “free speech.”

There really is a way to balance these two things: you don't censor outright, but you just don't rank it highly. So it's not easy to find, but the moment someone searches about something, or spends more and more time narrowing down results in search of something that matches a piece of data - if they really want to find data pertaining to their query - then in the index they can.

It might result in a resources problem (or storage and computing power), but theoretically it could even exhaustively apply to spam. Even spam would be indexed in a radical free speech database, but with good algorithms it'll just take longer to find because a very small (almost zero) people in the world algorithmically denote it as content of worth.

> In the Chinese case, the Chinese government gets to choose what is censored and any search engine has to censor the same things, whereas in the US it would presumably be Google that gets to decide what to censor and so someone could conceivably go to another search engine to avoid it.

I don't think that's true.

Google (and any other search engine) is compelled by US law to take down content that violates copyright. In China, Google will be compelled by Chinese law to take down content that e.g. criticize the government. See the similarities?

Sure, you could argue that taking down copyright infringing content is ultimately good for society, while taking down content critical of the government is bad for society, and yes I am of that opinion myself.

But this is a subjective moral judgement, and not a universal truth. And just like there are people in the US who morally object to copyright enforcement, you will find people in China who do _not_ morally object to censorship, at all.

In any case, it's not like Google is making any _less_ information available to Chinese internet users by operating in China. Whatever will be censored was already inaccessible to Chinese internet users, because Baidu, Bing and so on are already applying the same censorship anyway.

I think I was maybe unclear in my first reply but I think that it is ultimately a moral judgement of the company (ie the company’s management plus any employeee unrest) as to whether they (a) operate in some market following its laws, and (b) what rules or policies they apply on their own accord.

Just because this is a fuzzy moral judgement it does not mean that one must choose an absolute (although this may be an easier position to hold), but rather (and this is what I am suggesting is likely to happen) they will choose somewhere in between, even if this is not a consistent position. Therefore it is silly to say things are the same when different people consider them different in different ways and those people may influence the decision of google to enter/leave the market or to change internal policies.

Very few people believe in absolute free speech; few people think it is okay to falsely say someone is a paedophile, which gets them lynched. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-44709103 Absolute free speech is very rarely the actual debate. The actual debate starts after we all, mostly, agree that people shouldn't be lynched or defamed from comments.

If I am reading you correctly, you are saying that all restrictions of free speech are basically equivalent. You claim that these things are "exactly" the same: moderating harassment on a private website versus government-enforced suppression of evidence of a massacre. You conclude that to be for one but not the other is to be hypocritical. I think that's a very reductionist way of looking at some complex issues.

Saying somebody is a hypocrite isn't an argument against what they are saying.

I'm having a hard time understanding how Google employees will shut down "immoral" project's for the US Dept of Defense programs like "Project Maven," yet hold their tongues in building an application that limits speech, aiding a repressive regime.

Because it was less about principle and more about politics. If let’s say Bernie had won, this would not been raised as big issue.

Where does the article say Google employees are holding their tongues?

Indeed, the fact that only a small amount of staff appear to have access to this project and one of them has leaked it for moral reasons suggests rather the opposite tbh.

The proof of the pudding will be in the eating. Will this project be derailed? I’m betting not.

These employees are heroes. If you are reading this: Thank you for standing up for Human Rights.

Why is software that can be used by the military to more effectively label drone targets a violation of human rights? Bias: I am in the Air Force.

I’m talking about leaking the censorship program.

It's arguably a violation of the human rights of the people who are being targeted. Not everyone who works at Google are American, and it's conceivable that someone contributing software to such a project could themselves become a drone target, depending on their nationality.

I am having a hard time understanding that he has Indian background and how come he is aloof to ramifications of censorship? He is actively pushing censorship, what government will not want to have a censored version of web? One version for Sikh, different one for Muslim and a different one for Hindu. Well done Sundar, even thinking about it. You will be beholden to local laws, and local laws will always change towards repressive side very easily if that means accomodating this project.

Literally all of your comments in this thread are on Indians, India, or Hindus. You've commented multiple times on "the damaging impact this might have on India down the line", but pay no heed to the subject of this whole topic: the immediate damaging effects on Chinese citizens.

As an Indian myself, I'm completely baffled by your tangents and you choosing to actively ignore the main issue at hand. This is not an issue because it might hurt India. This is an issue because it will hurt Chinese citizens.

My comments are on Indian government, and not Indians or Hindus. Where have I insinuated anything about Hindus? It is absolutely certain to hurt Indians in future, if Google goes ahead and implements it in China. This is what I am doing, bringing in another viewpoint which I didn't see being brought up beforehand. It is a valid viewpoint. Stop getting all nationalistic on me, especially when it comes to defending censorship.

If you have meaningful rebuttal of any of my points I will consider it, otherwise your reply is bringing in nothing except strawman arguments. India has a history of censoring and also vilifying its minorities.

> It is absolutely certain to hurt Indians in future,

See, you're missing the point again. India is irrelevant to this discussion. It's tangential at best.

Let's look at an example:

mywacaday asked [1]: "Why should there be a different standard for Google and other tech companies to not expand into China"

And you responded [2]: "Because it will degrade democracy in countries like India."

No. That's not the reason. That is a completely disjointed and bizarre tangent. India is irrelevant to the real issues at hand here, but in each comment you try to find a way to shoehorn it into the discussion.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17661610

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17662806

The censorship project won't remain confined to China. Absolutely and directly relevant, as countries that have germinating democracies right now will not continue on the path. If this project gets implemented in China, India is next and I have a right to bring my viewpoint to this discussion. India already loves censorship as it is. Looks like your issue is why India is being mentioned, I have no control over your emotions.

>The censorship project won't remain confined to China.

Another aspect of this is that once Google gets addicted to Chinese revenue, China will have leverage over them. It's much easier for Google (from shareholder-relations perspective) to stay out of China than it would be to start making tens of billions of dollars there and then pull out when China starts uncomfortably twisting their arm more. I wonder what concessions they are getting out of a company heavily relying on China, like Apple. Google would be even scarier.

> The censorship project won't remain confined to China.

I agree, but this is not the immediate issue with the current decision being made - as you implied. The immediate issue is the enforcement of the loss of freedom for Chinese citizens.

The move has repercussions far beyond the immediate issue. This nefarious project can't be viewed in isolation with far worse ramifications that will follow. My viewpoint brings that in focus. I still don't know why you accused me "all of my comments are on Hindus", when none was in fact disparaging to Indians or Hindus.

You realize this is an article that exists because a Google employee leaked it to the press right?

The difference is significant however.

The Google/Maven project just barely got started and people were resigning in protest.

The Google/China project has...

Teams of programmers and engineers creat[ing] a custom Android app, different versions of which have been named “Maotai” and “Longfei.” The app has already been demonstrated to the Chinese government; the finalized version could be launched in the next six to nine months

and nobody is resigning or internally protesting.

Not only that, Fei Fei Li set up an AI research shop in China for Google and was one of the most outspoken advocates of keeping Maven quiet, yet is loud about Google/China AI cooperation on literally exactly the same technology.

So Google, employees and management, have clearly chosen a side here, even if it wasn't an intentional policy.

And just to be excruciatingly clear, the work that Google is doing in China includes a heavy specific computer vision piece around object detection/recognition/segmentation, which will be used with the Yilong UAV systems (and others) as well as the Guangdong social experiments.

Google employees practically rioted when they found out their employer was trying to get a contract with the American Government, but will just cash their RSUs when they help the Chinese government censor its citizens.

Sad.

The Chinese government is going to censor its citizens regardless though.

Will they be able to do it as well as google can? I guess as long as the stock price goes up. Cool man.

What's your point? The US military is going to engage in drone warfare regardless of the the objections of Google employees to Project Maven.

The US government will just give the AI contract to Raytheon/Northrop instead of Google. What's your point?

The difference is that providing a censored service is better than no service. Android for example is a much more limited experience in China. Do you honestly not think a Chinese citizen would prefer having a limited Play Store than none at all? Chinese people don't go around searching about Tiananmen Square every day, and they would much rather have access to all the cat videos on Youtube than none at all.

Whereas the Maven project, there wasn't really a user benefiting.

This is not about what the Chinese or any other government is doing. It is about the decisions of Google and certain employees of Google.

Deciding to not join with others in the national defense is a very divisive and political decision.

Deciding to aid totalitarian governments with censorship and other activities is likewise divisive and political.

Deciding to back one major political party, but not the other - similarly divisive and political.

If they didn't want the criticism, they would just take the bucks and do the business for whoever is paying. They are at least giving the appearance of making these decisions on ideological grounds. This moves them more into the arena of being an political organization. In which case, saying you're just doing business is pretty lame.

It should be obvious why Google's US employees dislike Trump more than China. China is just something far far away they can choose to ignore or punch depending on circumstances, but they are living the reality shaped by Trump. It might seem ironic, but pretty real TBH.

This is a leak. It is likely most employees didn't even know about this project until it just now hit the news. We will probably know more in the coming months if/when the broader employee population finds out about it and reacts to it.

Shit, I don't know about 99% of the projects my company has been working until they hit the news.

Since it only became known due to it being leaked, the news probably just hit the employees today, and they're already sharpening up their pitchforks. Their successful derailing of the US military program should give some hope. Obviously worker and owner motivation/interests at companies rarely align. At most companies, workers have zero say over what management/owners want to do, but it could be that internal organization at G is stronger than at other companies. I guess we'll see.

Hi, googler opposed to Maven here. I found out about this today, just like you. Fuck right off with your assumptions.

Are you planning to protest against this? Threaten to resign if google does not back off?

So what had fundamentally changed here? Is it just that China is a bigger market now? Did Google think they actually had enough leverage to get the Chinese to back down? Are the founders simply less idealistic than before?

Maybe a few billion of fines here and there make you rethink your sources of revenue?

The moral compass has shifted and Silicon Valley has learned to embrace censorship, at home and abroad.

The "moral compass" in the ad/surveillance industry was always set up to indicate the direction of money, and only existed as a tool for PR to begin with.

Hypothesis: the rise of the right to be forgotten in Europe served as a stepping stone. Free speech absolutists within the company could not be defeated in one step, but could be defeated in two steps.

I am not saying that right to be forgotten is halfway through from free-speech absolutism to full-blown state control of information, but come on. If you ever jumped from a high place, you know that every foot of height makes a lot of difference.

Right To Be Forgotten isn't a censorship move, it's toward personal and individual freedom, not corporate or government secrecy. However, you probably aren't too far from the truth that it is because of European laws.

Antitrust and privacy laws in Europe is going to make a lot of their business less profitable there. Which would lead to new efforts to make up that profit elsewhere. China's essentially an untapped market for Google, so its not a shock for the drive for money to eventually bring them back there.

Relating this to RTBF is interesting, but your thinking is muddled. Europe created RTBF, not Google. So the hypothesis that RTBF is part of a Google corporate plan to "defeat" internal activists is baseless. It just makes no sense on the face of it.

What I meant was: EU created RTBF, Google went "well, we must comply with local laws, and we can't get out of Europe". From there, it's a smaller leap to comply with worse local laws.

They don’t have to pretend to have a moral compass anymore, they’re already massive. Besides, people have seen through the lie of “don’t be evil” so why leave money on the table by living the lie? They just want money, lots and lots of money. They pretended to have a conscience when that was advantageous and dropped the act the moment it was more advantageous to do so.

There was another hn post a week or two ago, about how China is basically taking over the world, and could leave the USA in it's dust.

Google, may be aware of this 'transition', which is a scary one, considering the 'big brother' scheme they have in China, but if China becomes the king of the world, Google and many other companies will have to play ball to stay viable.

I'm reminded of a commercial where Americans are speaking Chinese, and there are also I think Japanese commercials that show poverty and feature American kids. Kind of disconcerting, and dystopian, but not out of the realm of imagination.

can you find a link to this HN post please?

China surpassing the US as an economic powerhouse doesn't imply poverty or the inability to have viable companies there. What a silly dichotomy.

Why should Apple be the only ones making money hand over fist from China (and be lauded for their eye popping revenues every quarter)

Not just that, but their CEO was even invited to a Chinese government conference where he backed their vision of the 'open' Internet.

Making phones is different from helping censorship.

Although admittedly, their phone operation is also controversial by letting works work extensively.

Yeah, why censor when you can collect all your users' data and give it straight to the government.

https://techcrunch.com/2018/07/17/apples-icloud-user-data-in...

Do you honestly think that's less bad than blocking a few websites that are already blocked and can be bypassed by VPN?

FYI Google makes money in China alright. It only closed the search function, not AdWords.

There are lots of tech companies active in countries like China, Russia, Iran, and other countries with varying ideas about privacy, human rights, etc. This generally requires complying with local legislation, whether you agree with that or not.

Singling out Google for not opting to exclude a fifth of the population of this planet from their products is a bit overkill. I'd rather they offer choice to the Chinese people on their terms than opting to not be in China at all. Google has huge stakes in China with Android, related production of many Android devices, and a lot of their other products. I imagine pulling out of China is not very practical for them at this point nor is selling phones without Google search.

When I was still working on search Nokia Maps (now Here maps) we had to comply with all sorts of rules internationally, including for China. In addition to being weird about certain POIs (e.g. Tien an mien square) we also had to deal with their obfuscated GPS coordinates. They use some weird shifting algorithm that you have to license from them. The point is not the algorithm (you can find it online if you dig hard enough) but the fact that you had to talk to them to get a license. It's a control point for them.

Another weird thing was that Iran insisted on referring to the Gulf as the Persian Gulf. One nice edge case there is the inflight maps of planes flying over their territory.

The point here is that doing business internationally is hard and taking the moral high ground basically means not doing business with a lot of countries.

How precisely does the fact that these countries exist 'require' complying with local legislation? Google is free to host their servers in other countries, which are free from censorship laws. It's not like Google needs to be present in that market to survive.

In a bigger context, the Internet business, and Google in particular, is a product of a free, liberal society. It couldn't have existed without freedom. Thus freedom is linked with success. So, as long as Google is innovative, it has that inherent advantage over its Chinese competitors.

Are you sure the Internet is a product of a free and liberal society? It may just be coincidence; America happened to be the largest economy on Earth when the Internet was developed.

I would argue that the basic design of the Internet is the most efficient way to build a large-scale, general-purpose computer network; this is why it has subsumed or is in the process of subsuming every other system. Had China been the world's largest economy at the time I think they would have developed the Internet too -- maybe they would have tried to build some kind of censorship in, but they would have quickly discovered that it is just more efficient to censor at the edges (I think they are already aware of this fact, given the amount of censorship they require from social media websites and the last-resort role the Great Firewall plays; there is also the general tolerance of businesses using VPNs to avoid the Great Firewall).

For what it's worth, there is innovation coming out of China, and it is happening at an increasing pace as the Chinese economy grows. The freedom to criticize your government or to organize a protest movement is not really necessary for technical innovation.

Is it a coincidence that USA was the largest economy on Earth? I don't think so. On the contrary, I think it became the most powerful country on Earth due to the free competition of talent and ideas, which is impossible without free speech.

Besides, Internet, being as wide open to anonymity as it is, simply never would never have been developed in a country like China, it would be deemed too dangerous. They may compete these days in electronics, but it doesn't mean they can compete in everything. Totalitarian society is always rotten in one way or another, and it manifests in all its output, including business, science, technology and culture. I'm saying this as a person born in the USSR.

Keep in mind that in 1776 when the Continental Congress declared independence, Britain was the largest economy in the world. America's declaration of independence lists out all the abuse of power and lack of freedom people endured under British rule. Despite all that, Britain had become the wealthiest country in human history at the time, commanding the most cutting-edge technology (the USA copied steam engines from the British) and having the most extensive system of trade to have ever existed up to then.

Sure, a measure of freedom is necessary to allow an economy to grow, but not nearly as much freedom as people enjoy in the USA. China is a case-in-point: their economy has rapidly expanded as the communist party has started to understand how far a bit of economic freedom goes. For all the freedoms people have in Japan, China managed to unseat Japan as the world's second-largest economy, and is on track to become the world's largest economy within our lifetimes.

China is not the USSR. China has embraced certain capitalist approaches -- like capital markets. The Chinese have figured out what the USSR never fully grasped: economic freedom is not the same thing as political freedom. The USSR tried to micromanage every aspect of the economy, but the Chinese have figured out that it is good enough to have a party member seated on the board of directors.

Right now it seems China's success is only temporary, owing a lot to undervaluation of its currency and to the low cost of labor. It cannot stay in this place forever - sooner or later the growth will stop, the cost of labor will go up, and that's when all the totalitarian warts, such as their weak justice system, corruption and ineffective management, will become obvious.

The US became the largest economy on Earth because it had 1700's era technology with which which to settle a colossal landmass rich in natural resources and with no real enemies to contend with, plus all the immigrants from all over the world to help make it a reality.

The US started a game of Civilization on easy mode.

Actually, it had colonial powers to contend with, but more importantly, internal factions. The fact that instead of disintegrating into multiple warring entities, it united and grew to become the powerful USA, speaks volumes to the strength of its foundation.

Incidentally, this is precisely where your Civilization analogy goes wrong: the real newly formed states have way more powerful centrifugal factors than those embedded into mechanics of the game.

> I'd rather they offer choice to the Chinese people on their terms than opting to not be in China at all.

Very much agreed. And I'd add that by offering that choice they're making Chinese internet users strictly better off, rather than worse off. By operating in China, Google isn't making any _less_ information available to Chinese internet users, since Baidu, Bing etc are already censored anyway. If anything, it will likely be a net win in terms of access to information and user experience as we'd finally see some meaningful competition to Baidu.

And Google gets to make money off the backs of people stuck in an ever darkening dystopian society.

Win.win.

Monsters.

For those inclined to disengage with Google and its products, this is a previous HN post on exactly that: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17280558

I would not tolerate a company that build physical handcuffs to keep an entire population from expressing their opinion.

I feel comparably icky about "mental handcuffs."

What a beautiful description.

Brilliant business strategy. 1. Profess "Don't Be Evil" 2. Dominate the market. 3. Be as evil as you like.

Americans call this simply “business strategy”.

The “brilliant” descriptor depends how many millions of dollars they make.

When Tim Cook backs China’s vision of an ‘open’ Internet in a Chinese forum, HN says that at least Apple is providing some service to the Chinese users, who will have worse services if apple drops out of China. Apple routinely blocks apps on the request of the Chinese government. But if Goole too decides to provides services to China, in accordance with Chinese law, the reaction is so different here. Not taking any sides here, just highlighting the different ways different companies are judged on HN.

You got any links to some of those discussions with such overwhelming support for censorship on HN? Because your claim doesn't sound even remotely true from my own personal experience on here. Your response does however sound like a typrical Whataboutism comment on here.

See the top comment on this thread(and other comments too) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16414703.

I am not able to find the HN thread on Tim Cook's comments, but here is a WaPo link: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2017/12/04...

For some more info on apple helping censorship in China: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_of_the_iTunes_Store...

I am not saying Apple is wrong in choosing to operate in a very lucrative market, but just that other companies are no worse than Apple.

The top-level comment is not representative because sub comments may be voted higher. It is unfortunate that you base your opinion on a site by top-level comments instead of top-quality ones. I have unwaveringly been against Apple's approach here, made it clear in posts like the one you linked to, and yet still as a whole we're branded. It seems the real problem is volume (in frequency and loudness) and the inability for people to look beyond it.

HN is not an entity that says things, you're referring to specific people. Yeah, it is known that there are many supporting various despicable practices.

If you cared about doing the right thing instead of keeping score you would support this criticism of Google (and also criticize Apple and others).

The point of highlighting Apple's behaviour is not to discount Google's, or to prove an aggregate bias in HN's comments, but to put to light the fact that another corporation much respected for it's stance on privacy as a fundamental right does similar things. It helps in collating the big picture(which does indeed look bleak), which may get lost amidst voices criticising the behaviour of a single corporation.

But I think you're missing that Apple's encryption model protects user data from hostile servers (Secure Enclave). Google's encryption model... does not.

Well because Apple's main business isn't to provide access of information. And there is very little difference between an iPhone experience in China and iPhone experience to US.

The same could not be said about Google.

I'm pretty sure this is sample bias. The things we disagree with are much more highlighted in our consciousness; people with the opposite views to yours will see the opposite patterns on HN. There's even a name for this, as an HN user pointed out to me a while ago: "hostile media effect".

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

https://hn.algolia.com/?query=%22hostile%20media%20effect%22...

Your comment is very insightful. This is some new perspective for me.

It was for me too!

Small reminder that companies must submit all source code for review if they do business in China

Wait really?!? I'd love to see a link to that, so China has more knowledge about how the services that control everyone's digital lives function then we do in America. While I see the totalitarian effect that can have the lack of knowledge and trust in these brands is slowly turning me away especially since alternatives exist.

And?.. Many companies "submit" all their source code to anyone interested, regardless of doing business in China. Just saying. Among closed-source ones, Microsoft and many others have decades-long history of submitting the code for governments to review. Does it really matter for anything?

Or you mean even the code which doesn't leave company servers? Do you have a source then, because I'd have a hard time believing that.

That's news to me, and if true, stronger evidence for the likelihood of NSA / government backdoors.

That seems not believable at all i'd like to see source for that, i find hard to believe Apple, Oracle and such companies that are very protective for their code to submitted to one of most copy past countries in the world.

I've heard about this in the form of "if you want to sell hardware, you have to give them the blueprints", and companies doing it because they want to do business there.

I wouldn't be surprised if this included the source code of everything that ships with the device, but I'd think it doesn't extend to server-side code.

> That seems not believable at all i'd like to see source for that, i find hard to believe Apple, Oracle and such companies that are very protective for their code to submitted to one of most copy past countries in the world.

The actual implementation is important here. Does the Chinese government require the companies send them a tarball or just the opportunity to inspect it on the companies terms?

If it's the latter, I can see all kind of companies complying. It's not unheard of to allow code inspection and auditing by setting up a secure PC with the code with all the USB ports epoxied shut and no network connection. The inspector using it can read and take notes, but the notes have to be reviewed and cleared by the company before they can be taken away.

> companies must submit all source code for review if they do government contracts in China

FTFY

China slows down all non-domestic traffic. Even using a VPN, sites still load slow. It's kind of a tariff system to encourage local internet companies and discourage outside companies. Which is why they have WeChat and not Facebook dominating their society. And anyone who doesn't want to play by the government rules is blocked.

The $100b+ they have in the bank made it inevitable they needed to open a massive new oppressive market ASAP.

Succumbing to an onerous government is something companies with $100b+ in the bank just have to do to survive, like classify workers as contractors to not pay health care or move profits around to not pay taxes.

Wonder how Uber's experience in China will play out here -- people variously interpret it as state interference clearing the path for local competitors OR Didi being much better at meeting chinese cultural expectations for taxis.

This feels like a very different world than 1998 when G could launch an upstart search engine with 'free the world's information' in their DNA. in 1998 even in the tech bubble people still had no idea how the open web platform would be used. Now it's some combination of closed platform dominance, cookie farms, land grabs and spam.

Not surprising G is under pressure to play ball in china; the prevalence of android there (albeit in weird open forms sans G maps & tools) gives the government a geopolitical interest in tying some strings.

Where are the troves of Googler's who were against helping the US military? They're totally cool with helping China censor information?

Yes, people that support the PRC regime tend to also oppose the US military. How is this even the least bit surprising?

Are you seriously arguing that folks against maven were PRC shills?

Nobody said anything about shills. You can be anti-US and pro-China without being a shill.

I guess I just don't get the original comment. Even if some prc supporters oppose the US military, what on earth does that have to do with the (equally silly but for different reasons) "where are all the people who were against maven?" question if not to paint the majority of maven opponents as prc shills?

You actually don't believe there is a sizable group of PRC shills/ Chinese nationalists currently working at google?

Why would I? Can you point me to evidence one would use to form that opinion?

Er, some of us are just as pissed about this. What's your point? This also only just came out. We don't carry pagers for whenever our employer does something we don't agree with.

The article states that knowledge of the project was limited to a relatively small group of employees and was leaked by one of them who had moral concerns about it.

As much as I don't like Google, lets not forget that corporations aren't subject to human morality, which is the number one problem in our current economic model. All companies soon or later become "evil" if that translates into more profits. That evil has nothing to do with the biblical evil or a comic book villain concept ("Muhaha, I'll conquer the world!") but rather with total lack of empathy which in a human is usually a sign of serious, more often dangerous, mental issues. We gave corporations the power of ruining lives; that's the problem, not just Google which is simply a creature adapting to the environment it lives in.

But they are subject to the law, which I know ≠ human morality, but it is a machine that our economic model does interact with in the real world.

And on this, maybe there could be international / trans-national legal rules (enforced by major legal jurisdictions like US/EU) that could ban companies who economically operate in the west (with all our human rights freedoms), from breaking these human rights institutions in the east (i.e. even outside the US/EU jurisdictions) - forcing them to choose between one region's human rights standards or the other.

I don't get why people are complaining about Google doing it in China. They obviously need to test their innovations somewhere. Do you expect Google to drop new features like this on the North American market without proper QA?

Thank God please bring it back. Some Google is better than no Google at all. Freedom of speech sounds and looks aloft but in reality Google’s absence does far more harm to Chinese customers and citizens than a censored version.

IMO, obeying Chinese law is similar to obeying GDPR. It's not smart for any corporation to fight governments.

With the small difference that GDPR is empowering people while Chinese law is subjugating them.

Actually the law itself is probably not so bad... in my experience communist states always have decent laws, with various rights enshrined into them. It's just that in the implementation one always ends up with a boot stomping their face somehow.

And many corporations that don't specifically do business in the EU chose not to comply with the GDPR, which is fine. (I mean, I like the GDPR, and wish they would comply, but it's valid.)

The consequences for Google not obeying the demands of China are just... getting blocked in China, no?

This is interesting timing. I just released a podcast episode today about the history of the relationship between Google and China. To get caught up on what's going on listen to this. https://darknetdiaries.com/episode/19/

Just when I thought the US-China tensions would lead to positive progress in reducing China's censorship.

"chinese government controversies"

google: "your search did not match any documents"

"alternative political parties"

google: "your search did not match any documents"

...that said the titanic amount of noise and misinformation on the web itself becomes a sort of censorship.

What I recently heard is that there are Google workers actively protesting against Google's involvement with projects connected to US DoD and US Army. What I am not hearing now is Google workers actively protesting against Google enabling censorship and oppression in China. I wonder whether this is an artifact of how news are reported (or how I am consuming new) or a genuine phenomenon? And if the latter, why is that?

It sounds like the source for the leak is an insider, although the author is very cautious to tiptoe around saying that.

> which is being planned by a handful of top executives and managers at the company

This quote also paints it as a very hush-hush project that isn't under development yet, so maybe not widespread internal knowledge?

> It sounds like the source for the leak is an insider

Possible. Then again, why public open protests in one case and a clandestine leak in another? Does it imply protesting some things would be tolerated much easier by the management than the other - like protesting working with US government is OK, but protesting working with Chinese government is risky?

> This quote also paints it as a very hush-hush project

Possible. Though not that hush-hush anymore, so let's see what happens now.

if this is true, google has lost its soul! So disappointed...

I will have to switch to duck duck go

Each country has its own rules and for sure any company wishing to operate there should abide.

Be from North Korea or Cuba etc and then see if PayPal opens an account for you. I don't see PayPal fights for it, they simply abide the law and move on.

You have a company and the gov gives you tons of regulations that most of them are unfair? Your problem, take it or leave it.

You cannot open in NK because it has a trade block imposed by the US. Something similar was happening with Cuba or Iran. Let me tell you that abiding and legitimating freedom opressing regimes is not very american, even if it is for money.

> Let me tell you that abiding and legitimating freedom opressing regimes is not very american, even if it is for money.

This is really far from the truth,Israel and Saudi arabia are example how this is bullshit.

If you have examples where America puts money before the freedom of the individual to have a political opinion, then it's those examples that need to change, not our standard of America.

Nailed. I tried to convey both things. First how America is blocking some countries for political reasons linked with democracy and liberty. On the other side of the spectrum there is the need to trade with some shady regimes. This is the side in which America needs to be more firm. Regarding China, we should not celebrate that an American company legitimates this censorship. Moreso (more-so?) when the company itself made billions on top of a technology designed for sharing information in an open way.

Because Google's search engine isn't censored in the rest of its locations?

Yeah it's strange how nobody talks about the fact that google search is getting less and less relevant and more and more filled with garbage every year. It's downright terrible, I have to go to social media or search with lots of domain operators (if I can remember them) to actually find what I'm looking for.

I'm sure google's "analytics" say they are doing great and results are more relevant and engaging for them and their corporate partners than ever, but I am often walking away from a search not finding what I know still exists on the web. They are just a massive media conglomerate trying to promote other massive media orgs and their content, content that doesn't live in that bubble is increasingly out of bounds.

It's funny you say that. DDG, 2 years ago, was hard for me to use (less relevant). The last 3 months especially, they are about the same. I have a limited search set though...mostly .NET code searches.

I personally find that for a lot of queries, especially ones of the "trivial" or "smart" kind where I'm looking for some old meme or bit of fandom trivia, DDG often returns results that are noticeably worse. Not much worse, and not always - but often enough that if I don't find something on DDG, I frequently try the same search on Google anyway.

That said, DDG isn't that much worse than Google in terms of search quality, and is perfectly fine for more "serious" queries - It's an inferior user experience, admittedly, but I'm willing to drink RC Cola instead of drinking cane-sugar old-recipe Coke that also is contaminated with lead.

I always try DuckDuckGo first, and if I have trouble, then I fall back to Google. It doesn't cost me much, and I figure if I just default to Google then I'm endorsing a stagnant search market. It's better to support competitors to give them space to improve.

I want to tie this in with what happened to Youtube after Google bought it but I assume its speaking to the choir at this point.

> Yeah it's strange how nobody talks about the fact that google search is getting less and less relevant

Because it's not a fact? Or just a fact in a narrow community you belong to?

I haven't seen anybody using something else for at least 10 years now.

Relevant in relation to the terms in the search query, not in relation to other search engines.

I wonder if Google employees will be as outraged about this as they reportedly were about Project Maven...

Google has no morals. Only marketing.

This is less of a moral cliff than it was a few years ago, given how many restrictions the EU is placing on Google right now, between right-to-be-forgotten and hate speech laws.

Once this happens once... for one country, is it too far off to be available to any other country, regardless of it's interpretation or practice of politics?

Wonder if there will be another internal petition of google employees, this time demanding that google not kowtow to government of China.

Trade War - US is barking and CN is ignoring.

Google - Google bluffed and CN called. Now Google seems to stop bluffing.

Maybe I am wrong, but it seems to be the case.

Except that story headline is a lie.

See my post in the other Google thread from today about this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17663090

Wow hopefully this means I'll be able to use Firebase in China.

another thread https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17661214

Do no evil... unless it's gonna make us a TON?

From a business standpoint, I think it's only stupid for Google not to revisit such a huge market, then I wonder if they really have other choices that make business sense?

Sad, but ultimately unsurprising

A tactically-'ethical' startup of the near future's motto: "Don't be Google".

It is definitely worse to have a startup phase with the motto "don't be evil" and then later remove it once they've got everyone's data.

Please do not spread misinformation. They never changed their motto.

https://abc.xyz/investor/other/google-code-of-conduct.html

they moved it down or reworded it or something

https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/ne...

How about this for accuracy: "It is definitely worse to have a startup phase with the motto 'don't be evil' and then later heavily demote it once they've got everyone's data"

Still reads as irrational to me, but at least it's technically accurate.

It's worth remembering that "data" as they say stales very quickly. Knowing that you ordered a package two months ago is far less interesting than knowing you're expecting one next week. Or that you'll be booking a plane trip soon, and wouldn't you just love to know Delta is cheapest on that date?

"Having your data" isn't a binary concept. Their services degrade substantially once you turn off the firehose. You'll still get ads, but they won't be tailored to you. Maps won't be able to show your current position. Assistant won't be able to recognize your voice.

And that's fine, if you prefer that approach. But the concept of "having your data" in a historical context is meaningless. The only thing that matters is if that firehose is still available to them.

Turn it off if you like. It isn't a lost cause.

> The only thing that matters is if that firehose is still available to them.

Which it obviously is, so I'm not sure what point you were making viz. Google. The "turning off" of the items you mention is also entirely a user-visualization exercise. All of your data is still there inside the panopticon. Even not using Google service anywhere does not free you from it, if you send email to a Gmail user, lo, Google has it. So concerns about the behavior of a company with the market presence of Google are very relevant.

>The "turning off" of the items you mention is also entirely a user-visualization exercise.

Prove it. They offer controls for almost every service they provide. If you're going to claim they're visual-only, then prove that these controls do nothing.

https://myaccount.google.com/activitycontrols

https://adssettings.google.com/

> It's worth remembering that "data" as they say stales very quickly. Knowing that you ordered a package two months ago is far less interesting than knowing you're expecting one next week.

Comparatively less, yes, but knowing about all your packages is still very interesting and hugely privacy sensitive.

> You'll still get ads, but they won't be tailored to you.

TBH, all tailoring I've seen is comically bad. Yeah, they can know I bought shoes so they would show me shoe ads for the next three months. As if that's how humans behave - once we're in "shoe heat", we do nothing but buy shoes for three months and the task of the good ad system is to capture when the "shoe heat" starts and capitalize on it. I think if one wrote a comedy show about robots trying to understand human society and getting it hilariously wrong every time, the behavior of ad networks could supply great material for years.

> But the concept of "having your data" in a historical context is meaningless.

No it's not. There's a lot of private things in one's past than can be dug up and (ab)used. Ask any politician who went through an electoral campaign.

>Yeah, they can know I bought shoes so they would show me shoe ads for the next three months.

You might be surprised. Some people buy far more shoes than they need. Be it for fashion or simply the love of shopping, I wouldn't be surprised at all if targeting shoe ads at recent shoppers actually made sense.

>No it's not. There's a lot of private things in one's past than can be dug up and (ab)used.

I'm speaking strictly in terms of their business model and services. That's where live data is essential. Fear of potential blackmail seems pretty far removed from that context.

Nice, hopefully this will make my trip to China less annoying.

What does "censored" mean in this context? No anti-communist or anti-party propaganda?

Personally I feel that Google has slowly become more and more censored over the recent years, to the point that I do searches on multiple search engines if I'm not so sure about the Google results.

More than often there's not only a filter-bubble in my results, but there's more and more sites that suddenly disappeared over the years, but are high-ranking on DDG, Bing, Yandex, ... — especially in February / March 2018 there was a kind-of-extreme disappearance of sites in the results where I previously used Google to get to them.

Means they will hide the same stuff Bing has and will hide more stuff as and when the gov tells them to. You want to be inside the firewall you need to be “legal”

Too late...

They will never overtake Baidu, who have leaks of Googles algorithm, more data to train AI on, government support, an existing (better) product in asian languages, and a massive userbase.

> who have leaks of Googles algorithm

Sounds plausible, got any sources on that?

If they had leaks of Google's algorithm, they'd likely have a much more usable product...

Oh my sweet summer techy. An algorithm alone does not make a usable or successful product.

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

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

https://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/01/new-approach-to-chin...

Google enlisted the help of the NSA after their internal code repository was hacked. (And before the NSA hacked Google for surveillance purposes).

> [...] we detected a highly sophisticated and targeted attack on our corporate infrastructure originating from China that resulted in the theft of intellectual property from Google.

> These attacks and the surveillance they have uncovered--combined with the attempts over the past year to further limit free speech on the web--have led us to conclude that we should review the feasibility of our business operations in China. We have decided we are no longer willing to continue censoring our results on Google.cn, and so over the next few weeks we will be discussing with the Chinese government the basis on which we could operate an unfiltered search engine within the law, if at all. We recognize that this may well mean having to shut down Google.cn, and potentially our offices in China.

https://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/19/technology/19china.html

> Lanxiang, in east China’s Shandong Province, is a huge vocational school that was established with military support and trains some computer scientists for the military. The school’s computer network is operated by a company with close ties to Baidu, the dominant search engine in China and a competitor of Google.

> “I think it’s impossible for our students to hack Google or other U.S. companies because they are just high school graduates and not at an advanced level. [...]

I just realized that doing the above sourcing on google.cn would probably not have yielded any good results. This means Google itself is part of the censored content. That is pretty scary!

I'm sure they'll be able to overtake Baidu. Baidu's search product is terrible. The results are almost always unusable. The only times I find them useful is when it links to a quora-equivalent website where someone has asked your exact query.

However good or bad the product is, I would be very surprised if the Chinese government would allow Google to win significant market share against domestic companies. They might want Google in China for leverage, but they certainly wouldn't want them to be dominant.

My immediate reaction was "how can the CCP possibly cripple Google so much that Baidu can compete?". Anyone who's lived in China will have passionate views on how terrible Baidu's product is.

If there is any eastward leakage of Google's code, it's certainly not obvious in day-to-day usage of Baidu's search engine.

The results are almost always unusable.

Possibly because of the censorship? If so, Google isn't going to be much better.

Baidu doesn’t use page rank like google does, it also has a bunch of ads that look like search results

Not sure if search is what they really care about. With their exit from the Chinese market in 2010, they gave up quite a bit in the Play Store, Youtube, etc. I think they want an entry back into China for the extras, rather than the search.

Anyways, I still think Baidu is pretty garbage and I constantly rely on Bing for inside China searches.

Could have sworn I read about this some years ago.

Search terms about human rights, democracy, religion and peaceful protests will be among the words blacklisted in the search engine app

This is disgusting! I am not using Google Search anymore because of Firefox+DDG, but where are alternatives to YouTube, Gmail, Gmaps?

PeerTube as a YouTube alternative Fastmail, tutanota, protonmail, etc. as a Gmail alternative OpenStreetMap as a Google maps alternative.

> Fastmail

I can wholeheartedly endorse them. One other benefit is that they actually have real live humans doing customer support. I haven't needed it much (only when I was setting up my custom domain and feature requests), but it's very reassuring to know it's there.

It was the stories of people who were permanently locked out of their gmail accounts with no recourse and no one to call that ultimately caused me to abandon Google.

Why do the 1.4 billion people living there put up with it in the first place? Why they have just made Jinping a lifetime president? Why are they fine with their own Chinese tech companies doing this already?

It would help to understand the geopolitical causes of this environment instead of the constant faux outrage over Google doing what any business does, which is provide services in accordance to the laws where they operate.

I do not want a world where a few major US tech companies become political powers. This effort should be directed towards the government forces where it matters.

If you reach a certain scale you effectively are a political power, whether you want it or not.

What you do and under which circumstances you offer your business is a political statement, whether you want it or not.

There's no way out. You will be held responsible for what you do and what you don't do.

> There's no way out. You will be held responsible for what you do and what you don't do.

And that's fair actually. After all, with great power comes great responsibility. (At least in strict utilitarian sense action, non-action, private-public policies and so on are undoubtedly very much fall under the same consideration. That is, is it possible for the big company to do something? To maximize its utility function? If yes, then they should, right? Now it's up to the people to keep that function useful for them.)

> I do not want a world where a few major US tech companies become political powers.

They already are political powers because they are major companies. Tech and US doesn't really matter here. Google is among the biggest companies of the world. (Alphabet is currently 3rd on whatever 2018 list I just found.)

When a company this big moves results in a lot of currents shifting, and that means economies can change. And that's very much political. (Especially when it means cross-border business, and imported/exported competition and so on.)

> Why do the 1.4 billion people living there put up with it in the first place?

I have a close friend who's a member of the communist party, but we speak about these things frankly. This is my own opinion after talking with them

0. There was an uprising in 1989, and the people who protested were mown down with machineguns

1. The generation afterwards are conditioned to tie the communist party with China's new prosperity. Ie, the wealth you enjoy has only been possible thanks to the leadership of the communist party.

2. The people have no concept of how/why they would rule. It's a job for someone else. Setting the laws is viewed as a thing for experts, and if you wanted to set the law you'd join the communist party.

I've seen these same sentiments expressed by many in and from China. They enjoy what they have and do not have the same interest in democratic practice as the West, for better or worse.

That's why I question what the outrage is all about, when the very people living there have already made their choice.

Because people living in PRC are people and deserve the right to govern themselves.

Hell, the principle that the people are the rightful rulers is part of the PRC's name.

The people living there include those on May 35th that died for the freedom to choose who they vote for, as well as those in Hong Kong who are still frequently kidnapped.

You seem to be ignoring his first bullet point about being mowed down by machine guns, which is somewhat at odds with they “enjoy what they have” and do not have the same interest in democracy.

What is the difference between censorship and management of spam, fake news, sock puppet accounts etc?

Isn't there a big difference? It's removing fake junk vs hiding truthful information.

Who decides what Junk is? who guards the guardians?

There is such a thing as objective truth.

I disagree, facts do exist, the truth has always been a valuable asset for the ones who knows it. This is what most modern journalists or glorified bloggers don't get.

What exactly are you disagreeing with then? Or did you reply to the wrong post?

Simple: when you "manage" real news as if it were fake news, you are engaging in censorship.

China is emerging a country with a massive amount of people, while providing relative increase in standard of living and creating opportunity for large swaths of people. China has had a large uneducated population for a long time. They are doing it using a system that has often been shunned or ostracized. Western nations have historically done everything in their power, directly and indirectly to subvert alternative systems taking root. To me China makes sense: Keep the people focused. Create a modern resilient communist social structure that will stand globalization. As much as possible, keep the west and western influences out during incubation.

1) it's part of the social contract. freedom of speech is relatively new phenomena, and the history of the US has shown both the upsides and downsides of that right. standing in a town square and criticizing the king/emperor/lord would have gotten you imprisoned or killed for most of human history, from the times of the Roman emperors to the monarchies of more recent times. modern chinese trade certain rights that many in the West would consider "unalienable" for the efficiency of a tightly ruled authoritarian government that has been seen as instrumental in bringing two decades of unprecedented growth / lifting 500M people out of poverty.

2) the very fact that china has 1.4B makes the existence of an authoritarian government much more easier to understand. without defending the actions of the PRC, from a purely utilitarian standpoint censorship and state control of the media allows for greater social cohesion and the avoidance of ideas and movements that can spread and cause mass hysteria. china is very aware of its own history of such movements and the havoc they've created (the Taiping Rebellion for a great example).

Yes. They know if they do not control what the population may hear, say, or do, they themselves may fall like the bad governments of the past.

it is common for people to genuinely not care about the freedoms they are denied.

for instance, there is likely a law on the books in the USA which prohibits you from having your cattle graze on various lands. you would be incrementally more free if there was not that law, but do you care? no, the issue is not relevant to your life, nor is it relevant to any life you could imagine yourself realistically having from the starting point of the present moment. if you were a cattle farmer the issue would be more salient -- but there's still no guarantee that you would be railing against the law.

now, imagine that the prospect of democracy was what was forbidden, as it is in china. it's abstract, and the benefits are purely hypothetical for the chinese -- but there are hypothetical liabilities that come with democracy too, which might seem just as salient if you don't start from a position of being in favor of democracy.

"Why do the 1.4 billion people living there put up with it in the first place? Why they have just made Jinping a lifetime president? Why are they fine with their own Chinese tech companies doing this already?"

China is not a democracy, that's why. This should not be a shocking revelation. It is also easy to forget that there was a civil war in China after the Japanese withdrawal, and the American-backed Republic of China lost (they retreated to Taiwan; this is why such a small island is such a big deal to China). That was when the choice was made, and the Chinese people have not had a choice since then.

"It would help to understand the geopolitical causes of this environment"

Have you been living under a rock? China has one of the best-documented systems of censorship and propaganda, operated at the largest scale in human history. The Internet has greatly aided both of those efforts -- the great firewall for censorship, the 50-cent army for propaganda.

This has been explored ad nauseum, and there has been plenty of news about how the Chinese have refined and developed their various methods.

There are a couple of recurring themes here:

1. the hyper-moralising over google's business decisions, they're not the only company that modifies its business to access the chinese market nor is the chinese government the only one that demands censorship.

2. google employees' attempts to sabotage the company's business prospects.

1. It is because we/I expect better from Google. Google has such a huge responsibility, being the gateway to the world's information, and we trust them with that position. For-profit and deliberate blocking access to information erodes that trust. I would not care about other companies doing this, but seeing I care about Google doing this shows me that Google has a great PR/goodwill they've build up over the years. With this move I am left wondering if that is deserved, or if it was merely manipulating me for fanboy profit.

2. I think that is because they love working there, they hold their employer to a very high standard, and they don't want to take a pay cut to work for another (perhaps US-only) company with morals more aligned to theirs.

Doing (or even thinking about) ethical business, puts you at a disadvantage over those that care more about profit and increasing their power. Losing prospective profits by doing the right thing is not a popular choice for a commercial business, so the incentives are there to just sell out your soul and go along with censorship (or spying on your users). For Facebook, this went on for years, until they found themselves in a mess. This mess was the result of 1000s of decisions made by all employees (not just upper management). I commend Google's employees for standing up for their beliefs and vision for the company. Only in a very Ayn Rand world is this sabotage. I am sure the big chief in charge of foreign markets views it as sabotage, but luckily Google is not run by only Eric Schmidt's.

Agree with all your points. I am wondering what justification Sergey,Larry will give for this. If they took good ethical decisions, they would gain more respect from people. I read the book The Google Guys when I was 13 (now 20). Larry,Sergey were the first 2 people i sorta idolized. Been a Google fanboy mainly due to their incredibe R&D,STEM focus. Now, i feel sad. Obviously, not gonna defend bad actions but it's difficult to overcome that bias,fanboyism cultivated over the years. I also wonder why Larry,Sergey are so out of action. They should have at least been more public till they're about 50 years old. Weird thought: maybe somehow Google will help overthrow the communist govt in China in the future. The fact that this news makes so many people sad is evidence of the fact that we expect better from Google.

Having a whiff of human decency is not hyper-moralising, it's really just having a whiff of human decency.

> google employees' attempts to sabotage the company's business prospects.

So having concerns about people getting killed for their opinions and whatnot is "hyper-moralising", but having concerns about "backstabbing" your employer isn't. Gotcha.

And it's not even backstabbing. When a friend of yours has a really horrible idea -- and that is putting it hyper-mildly in this context -- you are being more of a friend to them when you try to stop them.

>hyper-moralising over google's business decisions

People are hyper moralizing because Google is hyper powerful.

"With great power comes great responsibility".

>google employees' attempts to sabotage the company's business prospects.

Perhaps they are doing so because they see these as attemts to sabotage Google's mission:

"To organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful."

It is because Google put that hyper moralising hat on itself.

In their hay days, they crafted that hippy/liberal/sensible young alpha image to win customer approval, reducing government regulation and eat market shares against those faceless corporates.

Now they are the new baddies in town, the image no longer does them any good. They will retire it by then and be a normal company.

No, they will concentrate their hyper-moralising and virtue signalling on the US.

China, et al, will get a pass.

> "With great power comes great responsibility".

Remember this is HN. That saying has been warped to read:

"With great power comes great piles of cash"

3. Western people feeling outraged in place of people from other countries.

I would love to hear from more native Chinese people, but from what I've seen so far, most of them would much rather have access to limited services than nothing at all. Not being able to make Duo calls, access Play Store, access AppEngine, access Youtube, etc is far more of an issue to them than not being able to Google about tiananmen square.

I wonder if Chinese people will be able to search for Winnie the Pooh.

Sure they will, but they'll never be able to leave the country, fly or get a train ticket again.

> I wonder if Chinese people will be able to search for Winnie the Pooh

For context, Xi Jinping's feelings get hurt when people point out that he physically resembles Winnie the Pooh [1].

[1] https://www.theverge.com/2017/7/18/15993136/winnie-the-pooh-...

I wonder if this will be met with the same intensity of internal backlash as their participation in that DoD object detection competition (AKA project Maven). I mean, helping the authoritarian Chinese government censor the web seems worse than helping the US government recognize whether there are people and cars on the ground.

Money doesn't stink.

Google already has a winsome search engine for mobile platform

not be evil

changed to:

Why not be evil

Seeing how launching "a limited Chinese lite version" went for many many many Western companies in China, I can tell following:

Communists are totally ok with these limited versions, they are more than eager to "lure in" foreign dotcoms. Their logic is: "let them grow business in China, when the time comes, their business in China becomes so big, that it can be held hostage, we can demand them anything"

Look at AirBnB:

They were swearing on the graves of their fathers that you ID verification data is gone the moment it is verified, .... yet you will be super surprised to see that if you book a place in China, ALL YOUR ID DATA will be automatically filed into the form that hotels have to send to Chinese ministry of interior.

Google has two choices:- to be outside - looking in, or to be inside - and engaged. It is axiomatic that China has roots in an oppressive communist titled government. I say titled because it was not communist in the classical sense, any more than the former USSR was communist - again in title only. China will gradually change and adapt - converge, to a more truly representative government as the middle class expands and the government learns they have nothing to fear but fear itself. Both former communist countries are doing far better than under their former party dictatorships.

I suggest everyone read "Gulag Archipelago"

I hope North Korea also is also opened up - engaged, in a similar manner.

"...doing far better than under their former party dictatorships..."

Not trying to split hairs or anything, but China is "...under their former party dictatorship..." It's the same party, the only difference is that the leaders today are mostly trained engineers and scientists instead of the mainly political thinkers who preceded them.

Hopefully change will proceed at a faster rate as political hacks go to pasture.

They have crossed a threshold and, if you continue to use Google products, you have crossed a threshold.

Google is now a willing and active participant in the coverup of massive human rights violations, including the open air murder of political protesters. If you pay for AdSense or G Suite, or even consume the "free" services, you are financing this.

I love free speech. I love individual liberty. I respect the sovereignty of nations. I believe societies are feee to choose. Should we impose our value system on the Chinese? No. We should try to relate and understand why the Chinese people have taken their route.

If and when we find our value systems at odds with those of other people we cannot conclude that ours is superior and undermine their freedom to choose. That’s just arrogant and — most importantly — unbecoming when you describe yourself as an advocate for freedom.

> We should try to relate and understand why the Chinese people have taken their route.

The people have not taken this route. The people were mowed down in the thousands during a peaceful protest in Tienamen Square.

> undermine their freedom to choose

They never had the freedom to choose in the first place.

People who are neck deep in the surveillance economy and have long sold out can't suddenly pretend to care about ethics without looking insincere.

Given the large majority seem to have no problem with Google, Facebook and others, and their ability to attract employees is unaffected it's obvious ethics is not a high priority for current or prospective employees, if anything the fawning is often cringy.

That also explains why inspite of Snowden's revelations no one really cares and there is no change. So there is little basis for ethical concern about China, unless the motive is purely posturing and grandstanding.

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