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Why is it unethical to launch a censored search product in China?

The alternative isn't to launch an uncensored search product. That's not possible. The alternative is simply to not be there.

How do the Chinese benefit from that?

It seems to me that the presence of any international company could only act as a wedge to gradually loosen censorship controls over time.

If Google is more restrictive than other search engines, this does not do any harm, since the other options still provide the less restricted results, meaning the exact same amount of information that is currently available to people in China will continue to be available, and will not be affected by Google's entry.

If Google is less restrictive, well then that's a win for the Chinese people.

This means that the entry of any search engine into China, restricted or not, is at worst neutral and at best good for the Chinese.

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It is unethical because it normalises the worst kind of censorship, the one that is meant to keep illegitimate rulers in power. This is not like other types of censorship that can be criticised and overturned by democratic means, but Google will now conflate the two to justify its actions.

Google not being in China has been a very prominent sign that this is not normal, that the Chinese regime does not speak for the Chinese people and therefore their laws have no legitimacy at all.

Google not being in China has been an ever present pointer towards the fact that Chinese search enginges do not tell the truth.

It is also unethical because Google can now be blackmailed by the Chinese regime, which will affect Google's behaviour towards its users in the rest of the world. This isn't just an ethical concern but also a very pragmatic one.

Thanks, this is a good argument.

Being from the western world, it is very clear to me what Google's absence from China signifies.

Given that China censors its media, do you think the Chinese citizenry are aware at all about Google's position up to this point, or its symbolism?

It seems to me that the Chinese would not be influenced by Google's absence or presence, since the reasoning is the kind of thing that would already be censored.

I don't know to what extent the Chinese people are aware of it or what range of feelings it provokes.

But the fact that Google isn't there and that Google is almost everywhere else cannot be censored.

At the very least it is (or rather was) an unresolved issue, an open question and the regime doesn't like open questions about its legitimacy.

I think that's important, not just for China itself but also for the rest of the world.

Can't it be censored, though? Isn't that the point? And if it can't be, what are we arguing about?

Somebody told me once that they met a person from mainland China. They showed them a picture of the Tank Man and asked them about Tiananmen Square. The person was dumbfounded and did not know what they were talking about. They tried to say "this is important to you!," but clearly it wasn't, and censorship had worked. This person would have needed much more than a trip overseas to have any interest in it.

I'm not sure why the Google story would be any different. Its symbolic to us because not only are we able to access it, but we go out of our way to make a big deal about it and study it. The fact that this information is available to Chinese citizens when they temporarily leave their country is not enough for it to become important to them.

The symbolism is important to us as westerners. But given that it is meaningless to the Chinese, I question whether trying to preserve that symbolism for ourselves outweighs the benefits that come from working with the Chinese people and providing them with a good product inside of a system that we mutually agree is terrible.

>Can't it be censored, though? Isn't that the point? And if it can't be, what are we arguing about?

I don't know what you're getting at. Explicit criticism of the regime can be censored. Questions raised implicitly by the fact that foreign services are blocked cannot be censored. They remain a thorn in the side of undemocratic regimes.

>I question whether trying to preserve that symbolism for ourselves outweighs the benefits [...]

I know you do, and I strongly disagree.

The benefits of yet another censored search engine, email program or photo app does not outweigh the damage that Google is doing to democracy all over the world by legitimising this particular sort of censorship.

Also, you keep going on about your doubts about the value of that symbolism for the Chinese people. But what about the value of that symbolism for the rest of us who want to live in democratic societies and see democracy strengthened and not weakened?

There were 2 arguments: beacon of truth and avoiding blackmail.

Regarding blackmail I suppose I would say that China already has search engines, which seem to have been able to provide a consistent experience for many years. I would imagine that if there were instances of them being blackmailed, we would have seen the results as drastic product changes or inconsistent experiences.

Since Google does not seem to be aspiring to provide a service that goes beyond that local competition in any profound ways, it seems hard to see why or what they would be blackmailed for, that others wouldn't.

Google has also tried to enter China once and willingly withdrew when it would not cooperate, so they have displayed historically a willingness to exit when the situation is something they cannot agree with.

For these reasons it seems unlikely that a blackmail situation would occur, or, if it did, what it would be for or what it would accomplish.

I'm not sure if this is what constitutes blackmail, but China demanded that all the world's airlines rename Taiwan to "Taiwan China" on their global websites, or they would ban the airlines from Chinese airspace:

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-06-04/qantas-to-refer-to-tai...

Staying out of the Chinese market could make Google less susceptible to the kind of censorship request that is also effective outside of China, like the airlines were forced to comply with.

Chinese search enginges don't have to be blackmailed by the regime as they can simply be orderd to comply. Foreign companies can be blackmailed once their China related business is a large enough chunk of overall revenue and profits.

Your argument about Google's historical willingness to exit is strangely circular, because that is exactly the stance they are now giving up on in spite of the fact that censorship has since gotten worse.

Regarding them exiting, I don't really see what's circular about that if they simply changed their minds about how they perceive the morality of censored results inside if China. It just means they have a line, and redrew it, perhaps depending on new considerations or a new moral perspective. Dunno.

To many Chinese people though, Google not in China is simply a sign that it can't compete with homegrown companies. Many are still drunk on the 厉害了我的国 kool-aid.

I'm sure there is a whole range of sentiments in China toward the issue of censorship and blocked foreign sites. I don't claim to know what exactly those sentiments are or for how many people it raises political questions at all.

But I think that Google's refusal to collaborate with Chinese censors has been an important statement in favor of democracy and freedom of expression that was heard all over the world. Some in China will have heard it as well.

Google's reputation will suffer from this and it will hurt them in a lot of indirect ways, such as hiring, discussions about taxation, competition regulation, advertising rules, privacy laws, developer sentiment towards their platforms, etc.

China has been ruled autocratically for thousands of years. There's nothing to "normalize." It is normal.

We have pretty substantial empirical evidence on the outcomes of US- and Silicon Valley-backed regime change operations in the modern world. They don't work out too well. One could argue that trying to plunge China into civil war is the real unethical behavior here.

Exposing the rulers of a country to criticism by its own people is not exactly regime change by a foreign power.

One party rule is not a prerequisite for avoiding civil war either. On the contrary, civil war is far less prevalent in democratic countries where it is possible to change things by peaceful means.

These are very weak arguments indeed.

The search in other parts of the world is already distorted or full on censored across various "morally acceptable bounds". China just happens to have different morality. This is more akin to McDonalds having a different menu everywhere than it is akin to Orwellian thought policing or that being a universal wrong. The morality is different and ethical is subjective. If you don't like it, don't use it, but to say this is some kind of outright evil imposed by the government is to ignore that the majority of Chinese support Confucian morality and there is little concept of Western style privacy. Why should China abide by Google employees morality? That is the bigger question to me. Why should Google abide by their employees morality either?

I strongly disagree. Political censorship that is supposed to keep rulers in power by shielding them from criticism is categorically different from the sort of McDonald's menu style censorship you're talking about.

Political censorship is meta-censorship if you will. It prevents people from openly debating and overturning other types of censorship or laws more generally.

Rules affecting the decision making process itself are never quite the same as other rules.

I think there are 2 ethical arguments in your message:

a) Someone's going to the bad thing anyway, so the world won't be worse off if it's us

b) I'll join the wrongdoing organisation in doing the bad things and affect change from within the cooperation framework

I think a) is quite hard to defend philosophically. We don't generally excuse a member of an actor just because the bad thing was done as a member of a group, either in everyday life (think raising kids) or in national law, or in international law.

b) would need a clearer and bigger counter-badness component with "the lesser evil" to even be arguably defensible, even then being a pretty dark shade of realpolitik.

>How do the Chinese benefit from that?

If products and services from companies like Apple and Google are not available in the market, it raises the question why. More people may become aware that there are certain limitations which prevent these services from being used.

Offering the censored versions means it is easier to think that things are the same as in other parts of the world - we even have access to the same products and services they are using.

I'm not saying that people would not otherwise know of the censorship - they certainly do. I see this more as an awareness thing. When something is constantly on people's minds, they might be more active in trying to push a change.

Of course, it is a bit hard to relate to this thing. Uber is pretty much the only example that I can come up with. In my local market, the taxi business used to be heavily regulated and Uber could not operate here. People having used to using Uber abroad were annoyed and I think that helped at least a bit in pushing more relaxed regulation.

> If products and services from companies like Apple and Google are not available in the market, it raises the question why

Having chinese friends, lot's of them didn't really know who these companies are. The absence doesn't make anyone ask questions.

> If products and services from companies like Apple and Google are not available ...

Products from Apple aren't available in China?! Hasn't Apple made billions of dollars in China every year for the last few year?

Maybe their argument is more in line with "harm reduction"? Just because we can't do the best thing doesn't mean we have to do nothing.

Harm-endorsement, or harm-monetization may be more accurate terms.

Just because it's realpolitik does not mean it's not ethical.

I actually do not think A is the proper argument here.

Google providing a restricted search service is not doing a "bad thing." It will be a product that helps people find what they are looking for, which is a good thing.

At the same time, they are restricted from sharing certain information, a restriction that is applied blanketly to all of China's citizenry.

Imagine that there exists a prison wherein any prisoner can escape by simply knowing the escape passphrase.

One of the jobs in this prison is to walk around providing water to the prisoners, keeping them alive. Everyone in the prison is prevented from speaking the escape phrase, punishable by death.

You are a water provider in this prison. You know the escape phrase. You know that by doing your job, more prisoners are fed more quickly and are healthier and have better lives. But you know they would have even better ones if they could escape.

Would the moral thing to do to be to quit in protest and remove yourself from the equation, because you cannot speak the passphrase, which is a decision that ultimately helps no one?

Or would the moral thing be to continue providing a helpful service that prisoners need, meanwhile having access to the prisoners and the wardens, and being able to push for the ability to speak?

It seems to me that the providing of water and the ability to speak the passphrase are two separate things that you as a water-provider have the ability to do. And when you remove yourself from the prison on the absolutist moral basis, you leave the prisoners worse off in practical terms, for essentially no purpose.

I think in Google's case, it is helpful to identify what is the water and what is the unspeakable passphrase. Water is returning benign results, and the unspeakable passphrase is (separate & distinctly) returning censored results.

Providing water is not a bad thing. It is a good thing. It is not aiding the prison in hurting its prisoners, it is keeping the prisoners alive and healthy. The citizens are permitted health, and it is a good thing to help them have it.

Providing benign search results is not a bad thing. It is a good thing. It is not aiding China in censorship, it is keeping the citizenry within quick reach of benign information. It is a good thing to help them have that.

A bad thing for you as a water-provider to do would be to not provide water, or whack the prisoners with sticks.

A bad thing for Google to do as a search provider would be to not provide benign results, or to develop tools for forcing the Chinese to have access to less information than they currently do.

The providing of water is a good thing and is distinct and separate from bad things.

Not speaking the escape phrase is not a bad thing, because it is not your choice. It is forced on you by the context.

At worst, not speaking the escape phrase lets you continue to provide water. At best, while you're there, you can try to convince the warden to loosen up, possibly leading to more freedom.

I think the point here is that given the threat of force, morality is not absolute, it is contextual. When your options are morality vs. survival (or knowledge/life-promoting things), then your morality must be re-evaluated, because survival (and life-promoting things) are the goal of any framework that is actually moral. Returning benign search results is a good/life-promoting thing.

There is a large swath of search results which are very good for the Chinese to have access to, which enriches their lives, which Google can provide better than anyone else. This is the knowledge/life promotion on one side of the equation. On the other, many are holding an absolutist position that only complete uncensorship can be offered morally.

They are holding adherence to the morality in a specific context (the US/free speech), above the actual goal of the morality, which is life-promotion.

I argue that when a morality leads to the removal of good/life-promoting things in this way, it must be re-evaluated for the context, because it is no longer achieving its goal. We must see what parts of the morality we cannot apply because _it is not our choice whether or not to apply it_. We discover that within the context of the threat of force, it is acceptable to abide by that force, and provide a subset of results that is still helpful for people to have access to.

Morality only applies to decisions you can make within a context. If you don't enter that context, you can't claim to be doing anything moral. And if you do, the things that are not your decision cannot be part of your morality. Given what remains, you do the best you can.

This is why I think Google should enter China with a restricted search engine.

I think this analogy/thought experiment breaks down because currently Google is not the water provider and instead has actively been sitting out of the prison and not playing the game, thus some amount of disapproval is shown from google. That is why entering is seen as negative, because it says to the world the game is okay. I agree that morality is contextual but the ever-present lack of Google search in China to me provided a strong message and is the most ethical.

To me, it seems that signaling what I belive is right vs wrong is less important than offering water to the prisoners.

But there is already water available. Google doesn't need to involve themselves. Its a money grab.

I think arguing against a "complete uncensorship" morality is barking at the wrong tree here. There are various restrictions on free speech in all countries that Google operates in. At issue is collaborating with an authoritarian regime and overbearing application of censorship to prop up the regime.

Or it could be used as a wedge to increase censorship in the U.S. overtime as the Chinese government exerts leverage over Google.

China is already doing this quite aggressively in the US universities.

This could have precedent for other markets, no? Countries would demand google censor themselves the way they did for China.

I think you have it backwards - Google will perfect it’s censorship offering in China then actively resell it to other governments

Because it's collaborating with the Chinese government to oppress the people.

> Why is it unethical to launch a censored search product in China?

No, it's ethical in the government's views.

However, then why do people in China would going to use such search engine knowing it's as bad as Baidu currently is?

Actually, to understand the problem here, you need to know who are the main user of Google in China: The progressives (maybe overly simplified, but these people are who actually sicked with Google for a very long time). And most of them also very sensitive to those bad things Google did in the recent years.

Plus, in the long run, a local Chinese company (Baidu for example) can bring far better benefit to the government compare to a foreign one, AND without causing any headache worrying about the company could become too strong to control.

So, Google just can't win the battle with local giants.

If Google re-enters China, the only thing they can probably be succeed, is to make Baidu fear again thus stop doing it's shitty business.

It's unethical to build the tools that repressive regimes use to subjugate their citizens.

Whether it's mass surveillance or automated censorship, if you help build it, it's wrong.

"It seems to me that the presence of any international company could only act as a wedge to gradually loosen censorship controls over time."

But future demands may go beyond censorship...

Thanks for laying this out. This challenges the conventional wisdom that somehow Google not entering China will lead to less censorship.

Isn't Google also helping the Chinese government with some tech projects?

Simplistic, but encompassing:

Liberals: It restricts free expression.

Conservatives: The government is picking winners and losers.

As for being a wedge to gradually loosen censorship. The GFC (Great Firewall of China) started with Western companies selling technologies and consulting to the Chinese government that enabled early versions. Did that participation act as a wedge that opened up Chinese society?

As I said at that time, China is the prototype. Now, we have not just these Western companies but also the Chinese selling Great Firewall solutions to other countries. (And the Chinese have the more turnkey systems and a proven track record.)

There's the old but apt adage: "Don't play by their rules."

(Which, by the way, has been modern China's approach to us, the past few decades.

Or, they've been playing by the rules they observed in us, not the ones they were told by us.

Break the law as much as you can. Cost/benefit. Might makes right...)

>It seems to me that the presence of any international company could only act as a wedge to gradually loosen censorship controls over time.

this was the justification to the more lenient treatment of china with international trade deals, it has gone nowhere, all that has happened it is has economically empowered china to become a lot more troublesome on the world stage, while they have not liberalized in virtually any way.

The presence of Google legitimizes and empowers the state level control of information that the CCP does at a massive scale, it does exactly the opposite of "acting as a wedge to gradually loosen censorship"

Should be noted that China is a country, that right now as we speak, is putting an entire ethnic group in concentration camps, 1 million+ people and more coming in an attempt to "reeducate them" and stamp out their culture.

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

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

This is not a system that Google should be legitimizing through collaboration.

I think this ignores the rest of my comment. Not sure I agree that trade deals and search engines work the same way.

You could also say that the United States is an imperialist devil that kills innocents in the middle east with drones, and that Google should exit the US in protest and move to Europe. But that doesn't seem like a great argument.

Seems like a decent argument to me dude.

Can't tell if you mean this as a joke, but the following this logically we'd find that every country is doing something immoral, and if we all exited/revolted at governments not 100% completely moral, we'd have a lawless anarchy of a world which is much worse than the one we live in now.

Sure, but lines should be drawn somewhere. The invasion of Iraq was a humanitarian nightmare and our country decided not to take any action to punish those who committed it. If the China performing censorship is enough a reason for Google to morally avoid that market, then the US certainly falls on the other side of the line as well. And if that's too far in the distant past, the war in Yemin should suffice.

For me, "somewhere" is the line between business and politics. People can use voice and voting to change their laws, and businesses are free to roam within those laws.

Promoting politics through business is a conflation that doesn't seem to serve anyone very well.

So as long as it is legal, everything is ethical for a business? This isn't meant to be a snarky comeback, I just really don't understand your point of view. If a business could legally get away with selling guns to an obvious terrorist organization, should they?

business and politics are not separate spheres.

This is going on because of in-group fallacies.

Anything that some Americans do wrong is because of "other Americans" or the Republican Party.

Anything that some Chinese do wrong is because of China as a monolithic entity.

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