> Google isn't trying to control or limit what people think.
I think proactive censorship for authoritarian governments (e.g., China) falls into this category.
I think proactive censorship for authoritarian governments (e.g., China) falls into this category.
Google is missing out on the soon-to-be biggest ad market of the world - at least partially due to ethical standards. Apple does earn a significant part of its revenues in China and has no problems with working with the govt there.
(I am not affiliated in any way with either company - just don't understand all the hate against Google)
So the relevant product groups and leadership are, at least to some degree, implicated in deciding to go along with rules they knew would be morally objectionable from the start.
That said, Chinese folks are imo quite right to cry "hypocrisy" on the degree of moral outrage US citizens level at Western nations given how many ways western nations police dissidents and stifle anti-government speech.
If not, the clearly the principle isn't so solid after all. But I don't know what to replace it with.
(I've removed contextual text that I think is irrelevant for this discussion.)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11504953
... Civil disobedience is the refusal to obey laws, not the refusal to uphold them. People participating in civil disobedience do it with the understanding that they can (and should) be prosecuted for such. They do so to act as martyrs.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11506428
...
The bottom line is, you need to be really, really careful when you start arguing for "ethics" and "morality" as a basis for execution of law. For instance, to make a concrete example: It could be argued that based on the ethics and morality of the Nazis, that the mass murders committed under the Holocaust were in fact them morally disobeying those supra-national human rights laws. Who are you to say that the Nazi morality is wrong? You can't point to the agreed-upon supra-national human rights laws, because you are in fact arguing that law should be violated based on morality!
In fact, one of the ways to view law is as an encoding of the morality of the society it covers. Sometimes laws, being fixed entities, and society, being ever changing, drift apart over time. Same as software drifts from the requirements of business if not kept up to date. It usually takes an example like this German one to point out the absurdity, and if the law really is no longer part of the society's morality, becomes fairly easy for lawmakers to fix. (As a reminder, this law being invoked is very old -- from when Germany was a monarchy and insulting dictator kings was morally a very serious crime!)