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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.