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Comment by schuke | Hacker News Reader

As a Chinese consumer I desperately need a viable alternative to Baidu. A consored Google would do so much good by bringing proper competition to the market.

I know censorship sucks. But peole concerned about it should fight it by means that minimze harm to users. Stronger encryption, tools that bypass the great firewall, standards and protocols against censorship and dictator influence, these would be a lot more meaningful than bashing a single company and a single product.

All companies that do business in China contribute to censorship and oppression indirectly by paying tax. The point have always been and should be makig sure these businesses bring a net benefit to the people.

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> A consored Google would do so much good by bringing proper competition to the market.

China is experiencing some weird shit right now. Before we can sort things out by ourselves, I don't think a new character can change the status quo magically.

Also, censorship is just one of the problems.

I use foreign service mainly because it's harder for CCP government to acquire my data, so I can fully enjoy my constitutional rights like freedom of speech outside China's Internet.

If Google operates the China branch completely independent of it's home company (No data sharing in between), then I will probably fine with it. But I DON'T think that would be the case here.

So in the worst case, Google China may one day became a tool that can monitor me even I'm using foreign services. I don't like that at all.

> But peole concerned about it should fight it by means that minimze harm to users. Stronger encryption, tools that bypass the great firewall, standards and protocols against censorship and dictator influence, these would be a lot more meaningful than bashing a single company and a single product.

Those people are building those things. Google could build those things -- and then people could use the real version of Google from inside of China and there would be no need for a censored one.

Before those things are built, what should my mother do to avoid being killed by those fake medical ads on Baidu? How should I explain to my mother she should always toggle on the VPN that doesn’t always work and use the search engine that she can’t even pronouce to avoid being scammed? And how can we scale up that effort two hundred million times so that all elderly people in China can save their hard-earned money and their health? And while all that happns how do we make sure the Party will simply sit and watch and not further restrict access?

Why would the fake ads go away under Google?

Because Baidu is monopolizing the search market in China. It also is especially dependent on misleading medicl searches financially. Organizationally there are reports that Lu Qi, its former CEO just lost out fighting those in favour of this business model. And CEO Robin Li is either bizarrely very delusional about the integrity of his business or extremely wicked in not giving a shit about cheating people into buying shoddy medical services. Baidu is evil pure and simple. Google on the other hand will be under special scrutiny from both the Chinese gov and overseas, though ironically for entirely opposite reasons. It’s extremely unlikely it will do anything remotely similiar to what Baidu does.

Perhaps you are unaware of how bad Google has been at this as well: https://www.theverge.com/2017/9/7/16257412/rehabs-near-me-go...

There is a huge portion of Google's revenue that comes from malicious, fraudulent ads, and they have very little financial reason to prevent themselves from making boatloads of money. They only locked down rehab ads once The Verge called them out on it.

Please read this whole expose, then decide if Google is really going to improve things in your country.

What an absurd false dichotomy. “Either let Google assist the Chinese government in censoring information or my Grandmother will die.” Seriously? It’s the government’s responsibility to prohibit false advertising, and in an environment that lacks such regulation, there’s no reason to think Google will do a better job of self-policing such ads than Baidu.

It’s the government’s responsibility yes but the government isn’t the only effective measure against false ads. The market works too so why not have both? Isn’t it even more necessary to have other resorts when the government isn’t elected and does not work? There of course is reason to think Google will do better because people are literally crying for an alternative. It’s a no brainer for anyone who wants to compete in China.

A “market based” solution makes no sense here. Both Google and Baidu are going to optimize for ad revenue, which means doing only the minimum in terms of self-policing to avoid government regulation, just as Google, Facebook and others have done in every other country in which they operate, including the US. The fact that Google is entering this market in the first place, in essence putting profit over ethics, weakens your point further.

You would be probably right in that bringing censored Google (actually it's not just Google but for the sake of discussion) to the mainland China will do much more good than harm. This, however, translates to that Google is willing to compromise that much for the profit and no one would be sure how much Google will compromise or even had compromised in other countries. In the other words, people fear that China gov't dilutes cooperate ethics (already compromised a lot, but still) to the point of no recovery.

It is a unfortunate situation, stalemated between two big superpowers. Probably the only reasonable (but probably not viable) solution is to ditch Google. shrug

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