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Comment by alexandercrohde | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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".

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.

> 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.

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

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.

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.

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