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Comment by bigtones | Hacker News Reader

Why are Microsoft and Google employees so different that it's OK for Microsoft to have a censored China specific Bing search engine, but it's not OK for Google to have one ?

https://www.bing.com/?mkt=zh-CN

https://www.economist.com/analects/2014/02/12/bings-chinese-...

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Many idealistic engineers were attracted to Google by its promise to not be evil, this is a betrayal of that promise. Microsoft's long reputation of being evil means that engineers that work there don't really care.

"Many idealistic engineers were attracted to Google by it's promise to not be evil"

Really? Just how many idealistic engineers are there?

Sincere idealism is rare. Most of the engineers I've met just want to make lots of money and work on interesting stuff, which is likely why the overwhelming majority of Google employees are still working there.

Plenty. Many are just bitter and disillusioned and afraid. Many have substantial investment of their own code and reputation that they can't take with them when they leave, not to mention the money they're leaving on the table (at t5 and above, 50%+ of pay is tied to 4-year vesting stock options). And that doesn't mention the institutional value that they're conceding to people they view as having betrayed their values - I have personally stayed in organizations way too long, trying to turn them around when they had gone in directions that were antithetical to their stated and previous goals.

Look at the ACLU: it still holds tremendous cultural cachet as the defender of free speech - but there's been a generational change, and while plenty of the old guard still believe in that ideal, there's a whole new guard that have basically the opposite stance - they're concerned mostly about stopping "Hate Speech". There's a really good argument to be made that they are right to do so, that they're trying to clean up the mess that their predecessors made.

(But I don't buy that last argument in the least, personally)

Google attracting idealistic engineers != All Google engineers are idealistic.

Like you identified, the idealistic ones will protest and maybe quit. Google will still likely be okay, it just won't be the place where idealistic engineers flock.

Microsoft company culture was not something everyone talked or dreamed about unlike Google. So doing what they do was not somehthing that shocked people. You need a search engine?, here you go, have some chinese Bing. No one bats an eye.

But Google has changed a lot. This makes developers sad.

The author did not work for Microsoft.

Because Google committed to not doing evil things like this. Doing the right thing is presented as being part of its culture.

Microsoft, on the other hand, has always been evil.

Who decides what is evil? I don't think it's evil. If I was living in China I would rather have access to a censored Google than no Google at all.

Some Google results in USA are removed for dcma reasons, are these considered censorship?

No. Much like trespassing isn't censorship either.

By many people, yes. And here in Europe, it's even so much worse (right to be forgotten, all kinds of hate speech, etc.)

To expand on the thought: some Google results in the USA are removed because they're child pornography, and even viewing or storing images of such outside of very narrow contexts is a crime.

Yes. It is not political censorship, however. There's a spectrum of speech, and political speech is generally considered to be the most important kind when it comes to freedom of speech protections.

It's not OK. Why is it so important to find similarities to justify behavior?

nobody uses bing lmao

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