This is the real world.
Google and the US are better off being present in China that being left out.
Google and the US are better off being present in China that being left out.
So while Google might benefit, humanity would suffer.
From the perspective of the US (Google is an American company) it is obviously tactically and strategically important to have the best information possible on what is going on in China. This is much, much easier to achieve when American companies are present "on the ground". For example, I am sure that this project gives the US a pretty good insight on what the Chinese government does. It would be much more difficult to ask Tencent how the Chinese system works, wouldn't it?
Foreign companies face different rules in China when compared to Chinese ones via selective enforcement of law. They will not be exposed to the same real Chinese system.
Edited my origins comment for clarity.
Likewise, search is increasingly less relevant as time goes on, so longer term vision likely drifts away from it anyways (which is more likely the real reason why google wants back into China).
Suppose that Chinese-born-and-bred search-engine-and-advertising-company, through virtue of having access to a massive economic resource, succeeds broadly and then enters the western markets. What then?
Not trying to justify any of this, but it's worth discussing.
Someone with less skills and expertise, who will hopefully make more mistakes implementing censorship? Or maybe someone with more skin in the game (e.g. locals) who might actually be more motivated to sabotage it?
But, conversely, Google implementing such a thing in China - and justifying it as moral there by these arguments - would also give them skills and expertise to do it US in the future, and a canned excuse as to why it's okay.
> Suppose that Chinese-born-and-bred search-engine-and-advertising-company, through virtue of having access to a massive economic resource, succeeds broadly and then enters the western markets. What then?
Then we engage in protectionism ourselves.
This is eerily reminiscent of arguments that people have used around Project Maven (cloud compute for drone footage). At this point I am starting to wonder if this style of argument has a fundamental weakness. E.g. if immoral act "X" is going to be done by someone, is it logical that the most moral actor "A" must do this? In the limit, this has the most moral actors doing the most evil. In fact, it has the most moral actors being the first to jump in to do evil, before anyone else even gets a chance to. That seems totally backwards.