Hacker News Reader

Comment by jostmey | Hacker News Reader

My take in the issue is that Google is being mismanaged. China will not allow a foreign company to compete against its home grown search engines, so why bother? By bowing to Chinese censorship, Google hurts its public image. Google's management should have expected that its employees, who joined Google on the premise of "Do not evil", would leak this to the public. In short, the people at the top of Google look like fools to me.

View on HN

We don't have the whole picture. Chinese might be open to some kind of a deal that could give Google share of the pie for a long time. If Internet really bifurcates and Chinese one spreads across most developing countries, it could pose a risk for Google to be left out of areas with majority of world's population.

Eric Schmidt said in a recent interview that the internet is going to split in two with China's version (censorship) v US's version (openness.) So...company behavior is matching that. I think the problem is that I firmly believe that freedom will win out in the long run. Chinese leadership will lose its grip once reality hits its economy, and Google's view is shortsighted in this regard imo. People will remember who helped suppress. A LOT can change in a decade.

Will the other tech companies be remembered for never resisting in the first place? IIRC Microsoft and Yahoo we're both like "censorship and tracking? HELL YEAH, where do we sign?" from day one.

That's quite different than Google tying search queries to a phone number. Though I also don't agree with censorship in Bing's regard either. Also from my understanding a lot of Bing/Yahoo results aren't "official policy" and the reports of censorship from 2014 have been addressed, a lot having to do with simplified Chinese characters/bad translation. Google even has higher share in China than Bing. Google already operates in China with .cn domain through Hong Kong, the new action is an entirely different posture.

Chinese government is not this monolith entity with a single will.

All major firms operating in China will have to have some sort of government connections who champion for them, otherwise its competitors will use their influence in government branches to put on more scrutiny on them, creating a competitive advantage.

At its core, this is not that different from major US firms having to have allies in media and Washington to avoid being heavily scrutinized. Although how the connections are established and how the influence is carried out might be new to US companies. Google will have to learn and compete at a disadvantage in the meantime.

>China will not allow a foreign company to compete against its home grown search engines, so why bother?

Bing is allowed in china

>Google hurts its public image

Sure some people get hurts but for some other, for example if I can use google service without having to mess with vpn, it would be convenient.

>> China will not allow a foreign company to compete against its home grown search engines, so why bother?

> Bing is allowed in china

It's probably more accurate to say the Chinese government will not allow a foreign company to out-compete one of its local champion companies. The Chinese government is probably fine with Google being a minor player, but they'd start to have issues if it starts dominating Baidu.

I'm sure some MBA has run the numbers and determined that operating in China provides $X over Y interval, I highly suspect another MBA has run the numbers and determined that operating in China costs $Z dollars to Google's brand, and I'd guess that X >>> Z.

The people at the top of Google are rich and have the freedom and resources to work on things that interest them.

Also, this is an old issue, Google in China.

I'm sure they won't start caring what a few outspoken individuals think by this point.

So what do you suggest instead?

Completely agree. The best thing they can do is focus on containment by focusing on winning all the countries surrounding China so that the Chinese companies can't really expand beyond China's borders.

There's nothing wrong with making sure Baidu, Tencent and all the other big Chinese companies remain largely China-only companies.

> China will not allow a foreign company to compete against its home grown search engines, so why bother?

No. China will let a foreign company compete against its home grown search engines under its own terms. There's no way we'd let a chinese company take over search in the US. Why should they allow an american search engine take over?

> By bowing to Chinese censorship, Google hurts its public image.

Google has bowed down to european and american censorship. What difference does it make if they bow to chinese censorship? You don't seem outraged at google censoring in the US and Europe.

> In short, the people at the top of Google look like fools to me.

Yeah. The multibillionaires look real foolish with their multibillions in the bank. Google execs don't care what employees think. It's not their job. They work for the shareholders, not their employees. Considering how well google's stock have been doing, it doesn't seem like shareholders are too shaken up about google getting back in china.

The faux moralizing is getting ridiculous. Especially when a significant portion of people on HN are demanding more censorship at home.

> There's no way we'd let a chinese company take over search in the US.

Why not? Korea and China dominate the manufacturing part, why should search be any different?

> Why not?

Because it's important ( national security level important ).

> Korea and China dominate the manufacturing part, why should search be any different?

Korea and China dominate the manufacturing part of search? What does that even mean?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com