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Comment by pytyper2 | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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!

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

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.

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"

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