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Comment by beginningguava | Hacker News Reader

>How, exactly, does Dragonfly make the world a worse place

It sets the precedent of Google censoring search results for a government. Once they do it for China you don't think other countries will say "censor these results like you did for China or GTFO"?

We've recently seen leaked internal discussions by Google engineers saying they want to ban media publications they don't like. You can say they're a private company but at this point if google bans you, you effectively don't exist online

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I admit to not having seen those discussions, but I doubt they show consensus within google that certain publications should be banned. In any group of people there will be some who will say they'd like to ban something, be it Hello Kitty or whatever.

Disclaimer: ex-googler

They don't need to show consensus; they simply need to show (as they have done) that there is some number of bad actors within the company with both the means and motivation to enforce their own bias on the rest of the world.

The claim I replied to is: "We've recently seen leaked internal discussions by Google engineers saying they want to ban media publications they don't like."

Individual engineers did not have the means to ban in 2013 when I was an engineer in Search Features. I seriously doubt that's changed.

Does it matter if there's consensus?

From everything we know so far, there was no consensus about Dragonfly, but it got built anyway.

If I were Google and a government told me to GTFO I would, leaving a message saying "Leader of Country, call this number when you change your mind", wait 5 mins for everyone to complain to the government, and then answer the phone

You'd be waiting more than 5 minutes. China has told lots of companies to get lost and built compelling substitutes internally. This is about Google wanting into the biggest global market in a bad way, not finally relenting to China's long term overtures.

Those other countries better have as big a market as China, or Google will choose to GTFO

Not to mention, they need an alternative to Google. Russia has Yandex, China has baidu, and everyone else has dickall.

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