Why would they? Google fears China is going to create their own version of Google and will lose access to the country and possibly more of Asia. They are going to try very hard to keep their foot in the door there.
They already lost access to China nine years ago, and are now trying to get that access back.
Google withdrew from China on their own.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_China#Operation_Aurora_...
For 9 years they ignored one of the world's largest market's, and likely soon to be the world's largest market. They don't get nearly enough credit for that, entering china now isn't going to be easy, with Baidu having such a stronghold there today.
Perhaps they thought China would change, perhaps they decided the risk of Baidu becoming a threat is too great, who knows. But does anyone really think Google not entering China will change anything?
If everyone in the United States stopped buying made in China products tomorrow, that could cause a change. But the Chinese who don't have access to Google? They'll just continue using Baidu.
Morals, perhaps.
This doesn't necessarily mean we need more rules - we could easily improve regulation by creating rules with fewer, broader commands. Certainly, this would create some inefficiency, but it would be inefficiency on the commercial side, rather than the legislative one. (i.e. simpler, broader laws make certain commercial activities illegal when there might be nuanced reasons that they should be allowed, vs detailed and exhaustive regulations create more corporate opportunity but also more loopholes and regulatory surface area.)
The issue here is that Google is trying to produce a product that conforms to Chinese laws for doing business in China. These laws are deeply offensive and immoral to many people in Google's largely-American workforce.
Trying to create a moral compass that multinational corporations can live by requires creating laws that apply to everyone on earth. Personally, I think that's a great idea. Then the hard work is in finding a set of global laws that everyone can agree on, and that's the sticking point, because peoples' moral sensibilities on earth are largely contradictory.
Americans would be quick to say "Well, we should all operate under democracy - let the people decide what these laws should be", not realizing that if we actually did world democracy 1-person-1-vote style, the legal framework they would live under would likely be some weird amalgamation of the Chinese & Indian political systems, because close to 50% of the population lives in those countries. America would get about 5% of the vote, so it's a good bet that our wishes would be ignored. Personally, though I love the idea of world government in theory, I didn't sign up for those conditions. Given the general resistance to globalization by populist bodies in basically every nation on earth, most other people didn't either.
Just see how many American company changed their website for GDPR
Your CEO won't want arrested in Thailand and extradite to China because their company in Europe violated a random law in China.
If you want to block cross-border capital flows, you're looking at a lot of collateral damage. Apple, Coca-Cola, Pepsi, Nike, McDonald's, KFC, Altria (Phillip Morris), and many others would lose > 50% of their revenue if they could not do business through international subsidiaries that operate according to the laws of the country that they do business in. That's a lot of American jobs lost and a lot of underfunded pension plans.
The problem with a lot of "too bad - just close the borders and have American companies build things in America for Americans" is that it ignores that the 1950s utopia they want to go back to was itself built on globalization. America was the engine of the Marshall Plan, and basically rebuilt the world after WW2. That allowed Americans of the 50s-80s to enjoy standards of living well above what the domestic economy would support. If we actually wanted to shut ourselves off from the world, the resulting economy would likely look a lot more like the America of the 1850s (before steamships made crossing the ocean a routine occurrence) or the North Korea/Cuba/Iran of today (as examples of other countries that have isolated themselves from the world economy).
There's no real issue with creating laws that apply to everybody here. Google is developing this thing in US. Therefore, American laws - and American cultural sensibilities - apply. If they don't want that, then they can do that development in China, by the workforce (and I mean executives in charge of the project as well as coders) that is subject to the same laws that they're working to implement.
The thing that's come back to bite Google now is that they have a culture of being very open internally. So for example, all the design docs, technical mailing lists, org chart, and source code repository for any work on Dragonfly is open to all Googlers. The article said that it's Googlers who do not work on Dragonfly that have been monitoring the source repository and leaked this to The Intercept; they may be American workers with American cultural sensibilities, but that doesn't mean that they're developing Dragonfly.
If this were Apple, they'd farm out all the human rights abuses to Foxconn [1], and the rest of their employees wouldn't know about it until it shows up in the press. I suspect the result of this is that anything Dragonfly-related is going to be designated HIP (High-value Intellectual Property, the category of source code where access is restricted to specific engineers) and all design discussions and mailing lists related to it will be locked down. That, IMHO, would suck for Google's culture, but I don't work there anymore so at least it doesn't affect me.
[1] https://nypost.com/2017/11/21/apple-has-been-using-teen-labo...
The main difference is in one instance it’s censoring itself + it’s censoring according to localized laws + some activist input (both right and left).
In China it’s basically also following laws to censor material plus doing some real-time censoring and removals.
So it could be argued it’s the kind of censorship that people disagree with rather than in principle being against it.
Does Google do other censorship that isn't noted in the search results? (particularly in the US?)
This ship has long sailed I'm afraid.