Google as an infrastructure provider simply has no business being involved in where my content is available. If they sell me a server that is not accessible from certain locations on the internet, I consider them to be selling a broken product.
Snark aside, the asymmetry in their dealings with foreign governments compared to their own is quite illuminating, and the above is by far not the only such incident
They bought a Chinese directory with a "search engine" that just redirects to Baidu, but kept all the juicy search terms to seed the future product.
https://www.reddit.com/r/conspiracy/comments/816mzt/big_alph...
Perhaps you're saying that, if provided with a list of 5 examples, you would defend why Google chose to censor in those specific cases. Unfortunately I don't know enough about the details of all these cases to be able to pick 5 particularly controversial examples, but I still feel uneasy about the amount of power Google has to silence opinions it disagrees with.
This is one of those times. I don’t agree with their messaging, but Alex Jones should be allowed. Again I completely whole heartily disagree with him, but we can’t be selective in this area.
We’ve kind of validated him to some degree and made him much much bigger than before.
There is a class of people who feel like they aren’t being heard or lied too. Yet we often use tactics to discredit them.
I think this only embolden them. We can even discuss things, without doing the mental laziness of saying. I don’t wanna look at your source, because it’s x.
Within universities, you can’t use one source, why would you think it’s ok now?
You need supporting claims, if you disagree, than support it.. stop being mentally lazy.
YouTube bans thousands of channels a day. It's their right to ban whomever they please and they likely didn't even give the channel owner a reason much less me. For all I know each one of those violated very reasonable terms.
Where did this list even come from? Why are these channels special enough to make it to this list? My guess is the poster agreed with their content, or found news about their banning through various conspiracy-oriented websites.
There's no reason whatsoever to think this list is interesting. There is, however, plenty of reason to think where it was posted is not worth my time.
I think the original point was that Google has a policy of censoring people based on the (perfectly legal) political views that those people have. As you say, Google has the absolute legal right to censor people because of their political views, and presumably you think it is not a problem if they do so.
So I don't think the interesting question is how many of the thousands of channels a day were banned for their unpopular political speech (nor is it interesting to know how special the channels on the r/conspiracy list are), but rather we should ask whether it is good for society if an entity as powerful as Google has this much editorial control over who is exposed to which ideas.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-03-21/youtube-b...
Perhaps you will say that "instructions on how to assemble firearms" is not an expression of a political view, however I would argue that preventing people from imparting legal factual information to help other people exercise a constitutional right seems like something that, if the government were to do it, would be a breach of their First Amendment rights.
So as not to be seen to be taking a specific view on "gun rights", let me give a different (hypothetical, and non-equivalent) situation to clarify what we mean by "banned for political views alone" here.
Suppose that Google had different politics and decided to ban channels that provided assistance to women seeking an abortion. Perhaps Google would allow channels to advocate, in the abstract, for "abortion rights", but not to give any practical advice on how to exercise them. I think that most people would agree that this would count as unconstitutional "viewpoint discrimination" if the government were to do it, so it is effectively a "ban for political views/expression" if Google do it as a private corporation.
I can't speak for the people that create these channels or want to make these expressions, but I have to assume that at least some of them think that they are making people safer by teaching them how to legally arm themselves. That seems to be a view that Google disagrees with, so they have implemented an editorial policy on YouTube which prevents people from expressing that view in a meaningful way.
Perhaps you think that Google would only be banning people for their political views if the company openly said to them: "We are banning your channel because of a political view you have, even if you never express that view in any of your videos." That seems like an unreasonably high bar to require though. If Google said "You can support any party you want, but we won't allow Democrat political candidates to put their campaign ads on their channel." then that would, at least to me, be a ban on political views.
Fires the memo guy
Complies to DMCA
My favourite is Google officially comparing EU’s right to be forgotten law with russia’s anti gay propaganda law... cannot get lower than that.
https://wikileaks.org/google-is-not-what-it-seems/
There are many allegations in there, but the most salacious one is that Schmidt’s girlfriend was illegally working for Hillary on State dept matters. (I believe they made audio recordings of the phone calls that prove this, but can’t find the shorter write up anywhere).
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jared_Cohen
The CEO of Jigsaw (formerly Google Ideas) advised both Condoleezza Rice and Hillary Clinton.
No, Google has no business in it, but export control does.
If you think the law is unjust, then target the law, don't target the companies which err on the side of legal caution. After all, certainly we'd prefer for companies to err on the side of regulators in many other cases...
Hetzner doesn't come even close in this regard.
[2] https://www.ovh.com/world/a2294.how-ovh-will-balance-develop...
The don't earn money by letting packets from Iran route to their network; The people who could be losing money are their customers who's content is restricted.
The Oracle JRE contains strong cryptography which is illegal to export to certain sanctioned countries. It being free doesn't change anything about that. That one is actually legitimate.
Plus, is it really illegal to export cryptography software? If that is the case, why are Java downloads the only ones restricted? Shouldn't, for example, Visual Studio and .Net also be blocked? I don't think it is for any valid legal reason. Just that they cannot make money from these countries, so they can't be bothered to let them access their download servers.
Microsoft does not sell products to any sanctioned countries[2].
Note that [1] has a giant loophole for open source software, which requires notice but not permission - so builds of .NET Core, OpenJDK, OpenSSL itself, and so on, can be exported no problem. Also, programs built WITH the primitives are "mass market", so are exemptable that way.
[1]: https://www.bis.doc.gov/index.php/policy-guidance/encryption [2]: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/exporting/faq.aspx
That doesn't make sense to me, letting people from those countries access resources on GCP does make Google money, since presumably Google will be paid by the website owner (which doesn't live in any of these countries) for the extra bandwidth/resources used by their website.
This is not much more far-fetched than the idea that a site like The Pirate Bay is guilty of "conspiring" with its users to infringe copyright.
"We're a piracy site, run by pirates, and we love piracy and pirates because of what piratical pirates we are, so we built a piracy site specially to cater to pirates and piracy! Also, we do not condone it in the slightest and built it for totally legitimate purposes, we promise!"
Yeah, gonna go with "no" on that one. It does not take an "imaginative" prosecutor to find the incredibly unbelievably subtle and deeply-hidden links between the Pirate Bay and its intended purpose.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IsoHunt#DMCA_takedown_notices
Of course the "intent" of the accused is something that a legal process can consider, but I've always been unimpressed with the argument of "It's right in the name!" when considering whether to censor The Pirate Bay. If they had changed their name to the "I Rate Bay", and branded themselves as a site for people to discuss and rate the quality of certain hex strings (magnet links), then, by the "It's right in the name!" argument, the site should be perfectly legal.
There were a number of factors which lead to the legal judgements against The Pirate Bay (across the multiple jurisdictions where the site is censored), but if the legality of a site were to come down to a single letter in its domain name, and not based at all on the actual functionality of the site, then I think that would put us in a very odd place in terms of freedom of speech and the enforceability of the law.
We're back to the "wine bricks" of the Prohibition era, with their "warning" not to leave the contents dissolved in a gallon of water in the cool cupboard for 21 days, to prevent "accidentally" creating wine:
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/ingenious-brick-he...
Can we really say <insert_megacorp_name_here> will do or not do 'X', or has some immutable policy 'Y', with any reliability? Historically, have we not seen that these policies change with the direction of the wind, and/or are applied inconsistently to suit narrative 'Z'?
What is true today may not be true tomorrow. There is no bastion of moral decency in cloud infra, and to make decisions based on a current stance is facile and probably pointless.
I'm far more interested in what awareness the GitLab folks have of this issue, and procedures in place to mitigate it, if any.
[1] - https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/migration/issues/649
[2] - https://www.treasury.gov/resource-center/sanctions/Programs/...
Either way, the best way to fix this is to lobby Congress.
But ideology can be a powerful reason. And people in Open Source can be very ideological. Certainly for me, this makes Gitlab a no-go. I want my code to be accessible by everyone. I do wonder what kind of pressure could be applied to Gitlab in terms of free software developers shunning the platform.
There might also be other reasons one would prefer to follow the spirit of the law and help put pressure on two dictatorships where at least one of them seeds instability in many countries.
I expect Google to make a little bit of an effort here.
It's another vector to apply pressure to get the issue resolved. There's the direct course (you to your congressperson) which likely won't matter, unless you have enough like-minded individuals all applying the same pressure.
Then there's the indirect course (business to congressperson) which will likely matter more, since the business can donate larger sums of money, all at once.
Politics is the opposite of business, as far as cash-flow is concerned. Business wants sustained, regular amounts to allow for forward planning. Politics wants bursted, large amounts of cash to immediately address issues of the day.
That is "as long as it's legal" doesn't seem to be the governing principle for Google right now.