Google's Project Dragonfly 'Terminated' in China
bbc.com
bbc.com
I know some people prefer to stick their noses up and hold what they perceive as the moral high ground, but do consider how lives of hundreds of millions of people will be affected by your actions/inactions.
The Chinese government would be able to access that data through Google's joint venture partner in China who actually controls the data.
And to think that Google would never submit to Chinese censorship in earnest is naive. Yahoo![1], Google, Microsoft, Cisco, AOL, Skype, and Nortel all willingly partook in aiding the censorship apparatus. Yahoo! even went so far as to out journalists and political targets for the Chinese government. Why wouldn't Google do the same?
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Yahoo!#Work_in_th...
Well AOL, Skype, and Nortel don't really exist as independent entities anymore. Microsoft already censors Skype globally (for profanity) the last I checked. Unfortunately censorship in other countries outside of China doesn't seem to get as much attention, but none of those tinpot dictatorship seem to have any trouble getting their hands on censorship technology from the west.
That Google already went down the road of developing a censorship platform with Dragonfly reveals their willingness to aid in government censorship.
The first news story I came a across searching (it seems fairly unbiased): https://m.sfgate.com/technology/dotcommentary/article/Cisco-...
I am not the kind of person to swing the morality flag pretty much ever, but if you don’t see what’s wrong with this, then I don’t know what else to say.
As for the moral flag, I think in context of Sino-US topics, that ship has sailed long ago. It's more useful to contextualize these decisions in a geopolitical / great powers competition lense. Having Google in China is good soft power opportunity for the US. Chinese people are eager for a baidu alternative. I'm not going to pretend that more engagement with China is going to lead to liberalization in the short-term, but I do think it goes a long way towards preventing future hostilities. And I think google being incentivized to operate in China and becoming proficient in bridging the Chinese-open web is a net good.
Even in the example you linked, Yahoo! said "it must respect the laws of governments in jurisdictions where it is operating." How is complying with this different than complying with a U.S. Government subpoena?
Unless the user clicks the little down arrow next to the URL, which opens the popup menu with "Cached".
And even if that were also censored, the titles, URLs and the first couple of lines of text returned by Google would speak volumes about what's going on. Imagine googling Tiananmen and getting page after page of search results which all turn out to be inaccessible. What would that tell you?
A more pertinent question is how many Chinese users would gladly browse the internet through Google's cache, if it were available to them.
A fair guess is a number at least as large as the number of Chinese users who used to browse the internet through VPNs before the government cracked down on those (nearly 1 in 3 of all Chinese internet users, according to [1], i.e. hundreds of millions).
> Splitting hairs over cache vs. linking the dead website is ignoring the point.
The point, which you appear to have missed, is that you can't expect the censorship to work as implied by the statement I responded to. Google wouldn't be allowed to simply serve up the same search results as outside China. It would have to remove them entirely.
[1] https://www.goldenfrog.com/blog/china-cracks-down-on-vpn-use...
Are you asking how censorship and subpoenas are different?
So what? That does not make censorship morally acceptable. This would be the same as saying that using slave labor is ok, if you do it in a country that already accepts slavery anyway, and you are treating you slaves better.
> And by surfacing better information for queries, it can also help people finding what they want for things that are not censored.
Once the state is performing censorship there is no such thing as "better information". If all information is filtered by the government, then all information is suspicious.
> but do consider how lives of hundreds of millions of people will be affected by your actions/inactions.
I have profound sympathy for the victims of authoritarian regimes, and I absolutely do not believe that the way to help them is to collaborate with the very system that oppresses them. Pretending otherwise sounds like Newspeak to me.
> I know some people prefer to stick their noses up and hold what they perceive as the moral high ground
Maybe some people are like that, but this is unimportant. The important thing is this: you have to put your own oxygen mask on before helping others. If we in the west allow our companies to collaborate with systems that hold values that are repugnant to our own, then we will become like those systems, not the other way around. There will be nowhere to hide. No thank you.
Let's not be naive: say what you want about the Chinese government, but they are not imbeciles. If they did not perceive Dragonfly as something that would help them maintain their repressive apparatus, they would not allow it.
Google is right in sustaining that it's up to Chinese citizens to uphold said government to standards (whatever they will be): it's a technology company that wanted an access to the Chinese market, not a charity working for the good of foreign people. That's extremely practical, not something that's on a scale of black and white.
When employees define Dragonfly internals as disturbing I'm prone to honestly think that it wouldn't have helped in finding censored material. Smells like something management would say to justify a money-driven decision. Looking for a gray scale in choices like these is a distraction.
See no evil - Hear no evil - Speak no evil - Accept moral ambiguity
They are kind of like Rorschach who refused to compromised in the last pages of Watchmen, even though it was the right thing to do (in my opinion).
I have relatives in China. Censorship is the least of their worries when the current Baidu monopoly is allowing promoted results that are sometimes flat-out evil (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Wei_Zexi).
I guess it could be all for show, but I've seen worse behavior from Facebook here
Letting the CCP export its censorship back into the West in the hopes that Google will improve life in China is a hell of a gamble.
And now imagine this comment goes on the top:
> Our best surgeons in the U.S. should fly to China to help them with organ transportation. Without us, they will do organ transportation using those organs anyway. But we have better technology and higher successful rate. So why don't we just go there to help them save more lives?
Airlines only remove Taiwanese paraphernalia when flights operates in China - you know complying to domestic Chinese laws. That's completely reasonable stuff that doesn't extend beyond Chinese borders. Has Bing exported censorship back to the West. Has EU right to be forgotten even made it's way to US and Canada? This is just fear mongering.
> Airlines only remove Taiwanese paraphernalia when flights operates in China - you know complying to domestic Chinese laws. That's completely reasonable stuff that doesn't extend beyond Chinese borders.
Three biggest US airlines bow to China Taiwan demand as deadline passes https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-44948599
Giving In to China, U.S. Airlines Drop Taiwan (in Name at Least) https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/25/business/taiwan-american-...
Airlines switching to ‘Taiwan, China’ https://www.scmp.com/news/china/policies-politics/article/21... Associated Press found 20 carriers, including Air Canada, British Airways and Lufthansa, that now refer to Taiwan, the self-ruled island that Beijing considers Chinese territory, as a part of China on their global websites.
>Three biggest US airlines bow to China Taiwan demand as deadline passes
That was interim solution, if you check AA / United / Delta, they removed references of "China" for Chinese/Taiwanese cities name altogether. Also asking companies to conform to UN recognized sovereign states as bullying is pretty silly.
Your argument appears to be "an independent body also recognizes Taiwan as part of China so airlines should do the same". Here's the problem: the United Nations did so at the behest of China and thus your argument becomes "China dictated that the United Nations recognize Taiwan as part of China and the airlines should bow to the same request." This is circular logic at best.
Which would be true if it weren't a unilateral decision. Obfuscating that through the United Nations doesn't change anything.
You are also incorrect that AA / United / Delta removed references to "China" for Chinese cities. I just tried them, Beijing, Shanghai etc all continue to mention China. Only Taipei's autocomplete does not include a country name. Again, I'm in California, so this contradicts your claim that: "Airlines only remove Taiwanese paraphernalia when flights operates in China".
I'm trying to understand your position. Is it that having ethical reservations about UN resolutions is childish, and the mature thing is to treat UN resolutions as ethically authoritative? Is it that resistance to treating Taiwan as a Chinese possession is childish? Something else entirely?
I honestly don't understand why US whataboutism comes up in every China thread. I have no relation to the US, and we hardly drink their koolaid here in Germany.
Cold hard cash already rules most of the world, including the UN (Saudi Arabia on the Human Rights Council, anyone?). That doesn't mean we have to accelerate this trend for the sake of consistency.
That's factually incorrect making your whataboutism in this comment and one where you replied directly to my comment seem like a deliberate attempt to rationalize the Chinese censorship apparatus.
https://www.newsweek.com/american-airlines-bows-china-delete...
> rationalize the Chinese censorship apparatus.
This is easy to rationalize, though I don't endorse how far China went - China started internet censorship apparatus in response to calls of ethnic violence after the XinJiang riots a decade ago. Facebook and Twitter was blocked post incident primarily because they refused to censor/filter these calls for violence (from both sides). Domestic terrorism doesn't fly in the west anymore, you can say China was prescient in this regards and many western companies lost out due to misplaced naivety. Now Google wants to crawl back when winds in the west is shifting.
Who fucking cares? The PATRIOT Act was in response to the worst terrorist attack on US soil in US history. Three thousand people. I have friends who were in New York then. The Japanese internment camps were in response to Pearl Harbor. If an action is wrong, the impetus doesn't fucking matter, the action is still wrong.
6-4 (Tiananmen) was not ethnic violence, do we agree on that? And the Chinese government does use internet censorship to suppress discussion of it, are you going to deny that?
As far as information control in terms of individual freedom, folks in PRC can just grab and VPN and shitpost or find competing narratives abroad. Access is possible and not even inconvenient. People in the west believes the effects of censorship is so overwhelming that it cannot possibly be circumvented to reach the "truth" that only they can attain. But most PRC folks are complacent with being ignorant. Similar to the plurality of low information readers in the west, who has access to diverse sources but somehow converges to western propaganda talking points comparable to the effects of censorship. Someone posted a western brand awareness and usage article yesterday, where 17% of Chinese internet users regularly use facebook and are aware of western perspectives. Do you think 17% of the west would go out of their way to learn the Chinese perspectives? Potential to be informed =/= informed citizenry.
???
The West recognizes what? The West now endorses Chinese Internet censorship? Western governments now also enforce Internet censorship? Did the White House start calling to Build The Firewall? What are you talking about?
> Access is possible and not even inconvenient.
The Chinese government spends billions of dollars on a system that doesn't work?
> Someone posted a western brand awareness and usage article yesterday, where 17% of Chinese internet users regularly use facebook and are aware of western perspectives.
Who cares about Chinese internet users' fucking Western brand awareness? I care about Chinese people knowing our own history, warts and all.
If you're ignorant about how trivial it is to access vpn and outside info in China then I'm not sure to say. The firewall and grey legislation around vpns is calibrated that low information audience gravitates towards party line while those seeking information has access.
Usage not brand awareness. The numbers suggests more Chinese people are aware of western and Chinese perspectives than vice versa. Leading me to ask, in general, who is actually more informed? Being immersed in both media landscapes allows better critical appraisal of what is actually happening then to pretend that just being in a free media environment somehow makes one more informed.
The structure is what matters. Kings and despots throughout history have frequently ruled fairly and justly. Out of all the decisions they made in that role, they probably made many more fair ones than unjust ones. But their making the right call in any particular case is not a reason they should have had that much power in the first place.
Western social media is stepping up moderation of harassment and calls for violence, but they're making an effort to do so in an accountable and transparent way while doing so. And I don't think even they are accountable enough; I hope that Instagram and WhatsApp really do get split off from Facebook.
> The firewall and grey legislation around vpns is calibrated that low information audience gravitates towards party line while those seeking information has access.
Am I understanding correctly that your position is that this is a good thing, or at least fine? Because this placates the masses which tend more towards violence or other destabilizing actions, while allowing elites to continue to have a robust debate? Is that an accurate characterization of your position?
> The numbers suggests more Chinese people are aware of western and Chinese perspectives than vice versa. Leading me to ask, in general, who is actually more informed?
I'm not worried about American awareness of Chinese perspectives. I'm worried about Americans' missing or inaccurate understanding of American history, e.g. the Lost Cause.
I'm not worried about Chinese awareness of American perspectives. I'm worried about Chinese suppressed or sanitized understanding of Chinese modern history, e.g. June 4th.
I don't give a fuck about Chinese people being able to read Americans' sanctimonious takes on Tiananmen. I want Chinese people to be able to read Liu Xiaobo's take on June 4th, on Charter 08, on 996.
This is actually crux of the issue for me. People are losing their minds over alt-right operating openly and undermining western institutions without applying the parallel to China. China is not a woke place. Chinese nationalism is legitimate problem - widespread calls for retaliatory killings after Uighers terrorist attacks, extreme dissatisfaction with foreign/white privileged of expats, out of control anti-HK/Taiwan/Korean/Japanese sentiment during diplomatic spats - all this is suppressed for civic order and development, and occasionally, very judiciously weaponized. Social media in the last few years have demonstrated that a broadly unfiltered public commons is not conducive to social order. See the shitshow that is Indian MSM nd increasingly runaway Hindu nationalism for the alternative. It's not that I don't value western liberal values, I just don't think China is ready for it now. Escaping middle income trap is more pressing than liberalization in the mid term. Also consider that the Chinese demographic pyramid is dangerously composed of angry, unmarried men. We're all familiar with that demographic right? So yes, the current system is fine in my opinion.
Brief touch on other points: I'm not inclined to give western corporate posturing brownie points until they actually deliver, which by and large China has. Doesn't matter if a cat is black or white so long as it catches mice. Well one cat's not catching mice.
>Chinese people to be able to read Liu Xiaobo's take on June 4th, on Charter 08, on 996.
Again, any Chinese person can read this via VPN that takes 10 minutes to setup, by and large the people who are interested does. There's something to be said about the greater Chinese cultural apathy towards politics deliberately engineered by the CPC, but to insinuate that a curious person in the mainland can't be just as informed as someone in the west is false. Personally, I'm more worried about misinformed Americans with enfranchisement and the ability to select loony presidential candidates that upends world order every 4 years than a revisionist Chinese state that has every geopolitical interest to continue the current world order, albeit with a more influential role.
Taiwan lost their seat at the United Nations in an attempt to appease mainland China. So, no, the United Nation isn't an objective source of naming conventions for Taiwan. And, yes, that is absolutely bullying.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-apple-icloud-insigh...
Or how they then nationalized the company that has access to all the iCloud encryption keys for accessing Apple user messages, pictures, videos, files, etc. at rest:
https://mashable.com/article/china-government-apple-icloud-d...
This is concerning but not surprising. After the Snowden leaks, a buddy of mine kept telling me that it was the tip of tmthe iceberg, that the private sector was even more dangerous than prism. I guess this is what he was talking about.
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/04/googles-sensorvault-ca...
It's easily forgotten that the nation currently lead by Donald Trump already has this power of international censorship. Doesn't even need hypothetical scenarios to be scary.
I don't understand how any search engine approved in China could be "surfacing better information in queries" - they are all effectively under the same authoritative control. Are you placing your believe in hopes and prayers that real information will be "accidentally" leaked to the oppressed masses in China? How cute.
> Any claim that Google would have helped China censor Chinese citizens ignores the fact that Chinese search engines are already censored
"...so it isn't helping, it's just business as usual."
The counterpoint is that having choice is helpful, especially when the choices include user segments, even if you don't experience it. Also, participating in oppressive behavior is immoral, regardless of the outcome.
It doesn't follow to me. The reverse actually. 'laws in this area are often vague' for a reason - so that You Can't Do That becomes not a judicial matter with precise as possible definition, but a matter of personal feeling. Then the rulers can come down hard on whoever just because they didn't like something.
That's more likely to pressure companies into being on the conservative side of things; censoring a little more rather than a litte less. And google's in it for the money in a big, rich market.
Doesn't change what? The vagueness of the laws? Whether google's in it or not? I'm sorry, I don't understand your point.
so, maintaining the status quo is not 'help'?
> I know some people prefer to stick their noses up and hold what they perceive as the moral high ground, but do consider how lives of hundreds of millions of people will be affected by your actions/inactions.
so which is it if one says no? sticking ones nose up or considering how the lives of millions of people will be affected by your actions/inactions?
or is it only sticking ones nose up when you disagree with the decision?
What was Google supposed to to? Show links to dead sites that don't load in the browser?
All other operational problems aside: Yes, I think that would be great! Let users know what their government is censoring.
Google already handles this with DMCA takedowns in the US. If you search a website that has been removed by DMCA, Google will notify you at the bottom of the screen. Telling the user that N number results are hidden because of censorship is probably a better approach.
And under some circumstances, it may quite literally be the most helpful result. If someone searches for Tiananmen Square, what they really need is a hint that it's time to switch to a VPN.
Users simply won't use Google if it's beating them with a stick to remind them that websites are censored and that users should use a VPN. Chinese citizens know about the censorship and most, outside of specific provinces, simply don't care. Those who do already use a VPN.
Another would be equal rights for women and ethnic minorities. I don't care if someone else's culture dictates that men should have legal control over their wives, or what have you—that's abhorrent, and human rights should be universal.
The false equivocation of protecting minority groups and human rights with "Should we notify of censorship in the results or the bottom of the screen?" is telling in this regard.
You have a underlying lack of understanding how censorship works. They don't just block websites. The Chinese government wants to filtering out results they don't like on accessible websites.
EDITS: typo
Why is it a bad thing?
If you really don't know, CCP's regime through economic growth has lifted from extreme poverty over 700 million people [0]. It's the same economic growth HN's well-wishers are lamenting about. Extreme poverty is not inability to buy the latest iPhone, it's malnutrition, lack of medical care, hard work, illnesses and likely early death.
You care about people who, you say, disappeared because of CCP's regime and at the same time absolutely don't care about hundreds of millions, most of whom would've still been suffering from extreme poverty and accompanying excessive mortality. The statistics of democratic India are lagging behind by very big margin and give an estimation of what could've been China's alternative reality [1].
[0] https://www.telegraph.co.uk/peoples-daily-online/opinion/pov...
[1] https://qz.com/india/1385642/after-china-india-pulled-most-p...
"just about as many"
The second link specifically says that it is not so.
And we're already heavily tied to china's economy why would forcing just one company to not cooperate help deligitimize their government?
Further, there's the whole 'national security' angle. Whether real or imagined, some people don't like the idea of US entities helping foreign entities gain a competitive advantage.
Not sure how pointing to a feigned moral superiority of 'those who stick their noses up' helps your argument either.
I'm not OP but I'd consider that a very 'sticking your nose up' take on the situation. It seems to consider westerners' self-image as more important than Chinese access.
But to go down that road, I'd argue it's worse for the citizens. As others here have pointed out. Google's software enables advanced citizen tracking for the Communist Party of China.
Prove me wrong though. Show me how Google China is better for 1.6B Chinese.
Especially for English language search.
Though I find that as a company, this is a slippery slope that it's better not to get on in the first place.
Can Google enter China and slowly affect change? Possibly
But from the track record of China and especially what's happening in Hong Kong, cooperating seems to be just feeding the beast. There needs to be genuine interest in opening up and making a change. So far, I do not see that but perhaps one day we can get there.
"Vague" is a neutral way of putting it.
The laws are "whatever the party declares today. Also, whatever the party declares tomorrow."
The whole value proposition of doing business in China is a gamble that tomorrow's set of party strictures will be equal or better than today's.
(Spolier: they won't!)
And yes, "the party" isn't a single monolithic thing. It's shorthand for "whichever levels of authority have influence and interest in what you're doing."
And no, this isn't comparably similar how the US or any other democratic nation operates.
Yes, Baidu already does this. But no one can do it as well as Google.
And just for context, Baidu is, currently, the only big player, and in most of the time considered to be the only player in the search engine market of Mainland China.
Then the US and EU both have censorship around things protected by law. So you can sue people to take down slanderous material, or material that violates copyrights or trademarks.
Works for me, and seems to empower the people, rather than the state...
> filtering of information related to things unsavory to the past of any given country in the EU
Could you link me to some credible sources for this?
Not filtering, but censorship.
" filtering of information related to things unsavory to the past of any given country in the EU."
Some specific reference to some EU government forcing companies to remove controversial information about their countries' past would help making your point (not saying it doesn't happen).
Books are also permanent storage, often stored centrally in public libraries. Does an individual have the right to have information about him removed from books in libraries? Wouldn't that be a kind of censorship? The only difference is that so called "right to be forgotten" applies to Google's electronic storage rather than your local library's books. Just like you don't have a right to remove pages about you from your local public library's copy of your high school yearbook, so you shouldn't have the right to remove information about yourself from Google's indexes. Both are censorship.
I watched a movie recently (though not a recent movie) that had a scene with some Nazi stuff in the background of one scene. The IMDB trivia notes for the film stated that the scene was removed when it was released in Germany.
(If I can remember the film, I'll edit this comment.)
Similarly, the American attitude towards copyright, trademark, and patent laws probably seems ridiculous and borderline unethical to Chinese companies looking to do business here. They seem (from the outside) to have no problem with a phone manufacturer calling itself "Applle" to piggyback on Apple's brand, but that is very illegal under American laws. Similarly, the amount of automatic filtering YouTube and other video hosts have to do under DMCA might block as much content as Chinese political auto-filtering does, although I would love to see more analysis of that.
Being from an American cultural background myself, I have an obvious set of intuitions about which of these are reasonable and which are ridiculous, but I find it hard to make a clear argument about why.
And being technically from European cultural background but having ingested plenty of American-made utopian visions of the world in my formative years, I find myself to have yet different obvious set of intuitions about this. Like e.g. I think copyright-related censorship is overused and borderline unethical, while speech threatening social stability might be a problem.
I say that only to reinforce your point that there's not one and not two, but many differing cultural conceptions about these things.
Even when copyrights are abused to attempt censorship, US copyright law specifically defines Fair Use as an exemption to protect valuable speech.
If you believe your system is better, then you really should not have to actively participate in fighting opposing systems of belief. Forcing it through just shows that you are motivated by self interest, and not a core belief in the superiority of your own values. Such a strategy will lose the hearts and minds of the people of China as well, and at which point who are you protecting the rights and interests of anymore if those who you seek to “help” aren’t even on your side?
Uh why ? I think it's exactly the opposite
the approach of "forcing" a foreign country to take on social/political beliefs seems like a very difficult task when the local culture doesn't already support them implicitly. The worst example of this in recent history is probably our(US) interactions in the middle east that in many ways have backfired and made the situation worse by creating economic uncertainty and power vacuums.
I think generally more liberal values become more attractive as economic prosperity. if this is true it seems like a simpler/more effective foreign policy strategy to create economic opportunity for citizens of the foreign country and simply tie an example of the liberal values we want to spread to those opportunities. Then pushes for these sorts of changes would have a much stronger local, and thus more aware of the local situation, base of support.
If the views really are superior it should be easy to derive them independently given examples as your lower level concerns become less of a problem. And if they come to those positions in a more independent way the likelihood that they'll last is much higher.
We tried the hug approach when China was prematurely let into the WTO. That backfired.
Our concern should be, first and foremost, with our own morality. Helping a dictator repress billions of people is wrong, against our values, and should not tolerated by people in our society.
The Chinese people have gained enormously in terms of their standard of living since 2001, and while political repression has not gotten better, it also has not gotten worse.
This is the main issue here. First and foremost morality is relative and our morals are not necessarily the right morals. Believing your way is the only right way and forcing others to conform is how dictatorships spread and start wars.
Second, imposing one’s own morals on others is immoral, and is what started the crusades, proselytizing, Christian missions, imperialism, and slavery.
Third, you may believe they have a brutalizing dictator, and this may be true or a simple misguided opinion based on ignorance at a distance, but if the population you are trying to help doesn’t agree with you then who’s interests are you really serving?
The reality is that regardless of whether China’s ways are in absolute terms (there are no absolute terms) wrong or not, American foreign policy towards China, or even other countries, has always been self-serving, and less about promoting “morals”. Much of the Cold War and anti-communism campaigns on the US were extremely immoral, and only in hindsight do we see that they were carried out of ignorance, prejudice, and a desire mostly to secure more Western allies.
And if you really believe whatever it is they are doing in China won’t work, it will collapse on its own like the Soviet Union. If you are a true free market democratic capitalist, then you should have no problem letting their system survive on its own merits. Anything else is just self-serving ulterior motive propoganda.
What’s the alternative? Only other censored search engines. And Chinese people know baidu search results suck ass compared to google’s.
So basically the western commentariat killing off dragonfly has a demonstrably negative impact on Chinese quality of life.
But we’re only trying to protect the freedoms of oppressed Chinese people, right?
Companies would be able to implement features they deem to be ethically questionable, so long as they or the public determined that "it's what the customer wanted, anyway".
It doesn't matter who it is, whether it's NSA or Russia or Sweden if Google is cooperating with them in unethical ways you should do something about it. Apathy and a blind eye is why corporations can get away with working people to death so we can live in comfort. People may have excuses for that but there is no excuse for allowing them to go so far as what has been written in dystopia literature.
Also just step back for a moment and try to think of scenarios in which people would have to apply your "don't fight opposing systems". I feel you will find it does not apply to a great many things.
Action must be taken.
It’s easier to deploy something already built than to build a system from scratch. There is a clear civil rights argument against letting American tech companies build this technology for dictators.
[] https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2018/10/its-not-fr...
1. IIRC, it is illegal for newspapers publish arrestee's full names in Germany to protect their privacy - assumption of innocence and all that. This law wouldn't hold in the US as it infringes on publishers 1A rights
You could have the same position as the fined person and you wouldn't be fined in Austria. The fine was imposed due to the context of the fora/background and the intent of communication, not the position itself.
> The courts felt it was an intentional move meant to rile up participants and disturb peace.
Are you saying that the seminars caused anti-Muslim violence? Were there incidents reported that made the connection?
https://hudoc.echr.coe.int/eng#%7B%22itemid%22:%5B%22002-121...
> Are you saying that the seminars caused anti-Muslim violence? Were there incidents reported that made the connection?
I was pretty clear on what I said. I repeat - The courts (not me) felt it was an intentional move meant to rile up participants and disturb peace.
The case appears to turn on the claim that "having sexual interest in children" is not paedophilia as long as there is also sexual interest in non-children, or, in other words, that the actual defamation was an implied claim that Muhammad did not have a sexual interest in adults.
> In their opinion, by accusing Muhammad of paedophilia, the applicant had merely sought to defame him, without providing evidence that his primary sexual interest in Aisha had been her not yet having reached puberty or that his other wives or concubines had been similarly young. In particular, the applicant had disregarded the fact that the marriage with Aisha had continued until the Prophet’s death, when she had already turned eighteen and had therefore passed the age of puberty.
This is the same anti-girl (and I emphasize "girl", not "woman") logic that refuses to punish rapists like the drivers' ed teacher in italy who raped a girl student who was wearing jeans without underwear, on the basis of her clothing.
If the last few years have shown anything, it's that you can get EU and US citizens to vote against their best interests using a convenient scapegoat or outgroup.
It depends. There are plenty of people who willingly pay more for non-Chinese goods when they can. The problem is that they often have no choice in the matter because so much is made in China.
There are lots of small manufacturing businesses new and old all across the country that are thriving because of where their stuff is made. The problem is that they can't make goods in large enough quantities to be carried in the national chain stores, so it's mostly online and word-of-mouth.
That's why it needs to be worked on a political level, like the post you replied to stated.
... under current international agreements and rules.
The agreements and rules change, the calculus changes. Companies optimize continuously for the current environment they find themselves in.
If Google were to refuse the Chinese terms of business, they would be barred from doing business with the largest population in the world. And the climate over there is that their government risks little political capital in banning non-compliant firms.
Foreign policy is hard and I don't pretend to know the best way to do it but I think given recent history we have to be more careful about how we try to influence developing nations so that we actually have the effect we want. This might include doing things that could seem unpalatable in the short term.
+ copyrights
+ trademarks
+ patents(really bogus patents)
+ religion(these days, US outright ban any casual religious reference because it offend some believers, resulting modifying some manga/anime/game)
+ national security
+ ex-political party symbol(swastika, but they can't tell the difference between nazi symbol and Buddism symbol which is widely used in Japanese commercial products, especially manga/anime/game)
+ child porno(their definition includes some commercial Japanese manga/anime/game which we believe not possibly be a child porn since it's a pure fiction and no real-life human being harmed).
I believe these are also a trade barrier for Japan. But I bet you disagree some of the above points and justify the censorship because it's against your moral based on your culture.
1. Copyright, trademarks, and patents are a pretty weak argument for "censorship" IMO. But I guess I see where you're coming from. There are also many "fair-use" exceptions for these that make it less "censorship" and more "preventing profit on other people's ideas".
2. "US outright ban any casual religious reference because it offend some believers, resulting modifying some manga/anime/game" -- Can you give an example? This seems to go directly against first amendment rights.
3. "national security" -- There have been many cases where the government will work with press to attempt to stop them from releasing information that would damage national security. There have also been many cases where the press has not listened, and they're allowed to do that. What specifically are you talking about here? Direct theft of government property/information is illegal, but I would hardly call that censorship. NDAs I guess are censorship, but they are an agreement between two parties, not the government deciding arbitrarily what to censor.
4. "ex-political party symbol" -- absolutely not banned in the US.
5. Okay the last one is a fair example of censorship. I'm not familiar with the US laws on that one and frankly I don't want to find out...
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/supreme-court/supreme-court...
I also would love to see some example and an not aware of cases were stuff was changed due to laws. There is self-censorship, as e.g. the Spice and Wolf anime trying very hard not to use christian symbols for the religion obviously modeled after Christianity. This kinda makes the target audience kinda look bad, but that's their choice and totally fine.
Also, it's not "rare" that the US censors mention of religion. It is completely unheard of in our modern history.
Like I said, many manga/anime/games were modified to remove any casual use of religious symbol when released in US. These days, major products don't contain these beforehand if it's famous enough to expect US release.
Most likely, the publishers themselves removed it to avoid controversy and sell more anime.
This one can be employed to justify any arbitrary measure applied by any arbitrary authority at any arbitrary point in time.
>This one can be employed to justify any arbitrary measure applied by any arbitrary authority at any arbitrary point in time
Yes it can but you don't have to agree with it
It certainly is not how they would want to be treated, or this whole discussion could simply be settled by the holders of one opinion murdering everyone else. Nobody wants that applied to them, making everybody who rationalizes it being done to others a vulgar hypocrite.
> + religion(these days, US outright ban any casual religious reference because it offend some believers, resulting modifying some manga/anime/game)
Religious sensitivities run high in the U.S., but criticizing or mocking (or advocating or practicing) a religion is a core territory of legally protected speech, and people very commonly criticize other people's religions and religious beliefs, including in mass media. There is no such ban.
> + national security
This is pretty complicated, but it appears that the courts will protect the publishers (not the leakers) of leaked classified information.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_Times_Co._v._United_S...
> + ex-political party symbol(swastika, but they can't tell the difference between nazi symbol and Buddism symbol which is widely used in Japanese commercial products, especially manga/anime/game)
The U.S., differently from many European countries, does not prohibit the sale or display of swastikas, including when they are actually used to show sympathy for the Nazi Party.
> + child porno(their definition includes some commercial Japanese manga/anime/game which we believe not possibly be a child porn since it's a pure fiction and no real-life human being harmed).
There's still always a risk of obscenity prosecutions for comics in the U.S., and import restrictions on sexually explicit material are famously much more restrictive than domestic restrictions (which sounds like the very definition of a trade barrier). But there is a Supreme Court case specifically addressing attempts to ban sexual images that depict fictional children
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ashcroft_v._Free_Speech_Coalit...
The Court did not accept categorically banning these images.
Like in fictional manga/anime/game where the character with supernatural power has attack power which when invoked, bright Christian cross or Buddism manzi appears or in-fiction religion(Totally not Christianity) use Christian cross as a symbol.
But I can assure you it's not illegal and the government has no power to ban media for using religious symbols this way.
> + religion(these days, US outright ban any casual religious reference because it offend some believers, resulting modifying some manga/anime/game)
Where has this happened? The censorship you're describing sounds like it violates the first amendment. I think people may decide to remove religious references because it offends people, but that's not the same as the government censoring it.
> + ex-political party symbol(swastika, but they can't tell the difference between nazi symbol and Buddism symbol which is widely used in Japanese commercial products, especially manga/anime/game)
Where has this happened? Again, considering we have straight up neo Nazis in the US who are allowed to display the actual swastika legally, I don't understand how this could happen.
Copyrights, trademarks, and patents are not censorship, they are actually designed to encourage the exposure of information (copyrighted/trademarked/patented information is free to view, that's the foundation of the concept) by promising restrictions on third party usage of the information, which is a concern for creators who avoid sharing their knowledge for fear of theft.
The US doesn't actually have any religious censorship laws (if you know of any, please link them) that cares about offence taken by religious believers. If private creators are modifying their own creations to sell better to a US audience, that has nothing to do with US censorship.
The US grants irrevocable protections to the press in publishing even sensitive and national security critical information. The US press voluntarily consults the government on the national security impact of publishing sensitive material, but the government has no legal avenue to actually prevent the press from publishing it. Demonstrations of this are pretty famous, like the Pentagon Papers. There are also whistleblower protections.
The US has no censorship laws on political symbols like the swastika, IIRC that's specifically a German thing.
Fictional child pornography such as the commercial Japanese manga/anime/games you mentioned is explicitly allowed under US law; US law specifically carves out an exception for fictional works, and the US Supreme Court has cemented this with precedent. Note: these exceptions have definitely been weakened in recent decades by the "PROTECT Act of 2003".
Feel free to correct me on details, but a lot of censorship you list here just isn't happening in the West, and definitely isn't happening in the US where Google is physically and culturally based. The level and breadth of censorship simply isn't comparable to China's.
Furthermore, "moral based on your culture" absolutely matters. To portray censorship as okay because it's based on differing morals based on differing cultures is ridiculous. Would you approve of US-committed atrocities if it was based on US culture?
Edit: removed references to whataboutism because after reconsidering the context, I think the parent comment is less of a deflection that I initially perceived.
this isn't done
>+ child porno(their definition includes some commercial Japanese manga/anime/game which we believe not possibly be a child porn since it's a pure fiction and no real-life human being harmed).
are you actually arguing in favor of not censoring this?
https://www.alphr.com/computing/1000120/public-figures-cant-...
But let's be perfectly clear that the Chinese did this out of censorship and the trade part happened to be a side-effect.
Seems we'd best be served to first collectively realize this. Then do as you suggest.
It seems this is governed by these standards, but I failed to dig up a copy of them. Is it true that any western company offering a mainland Chinese version of their product exposes these interfaces?
YD/T 2248-2015 - 互联网数据中心和互联网接入服务信息安全管理系统技术要求 - Interface requirements of information security management system for Internet data center/Internet service provider
YD/T 2406-2017 - 互联网数据中心和互联网接入服务信息安全管理系统及接口测试方法 - Test specifications of information security management system & interface for Internet data center/Internet service provider
YD/T 3212-2017 - 内容分发网络服务信息安全管理系统接口规范 - Interface standard of information security management system for content delivery network service
YD/T 3213-2017 - 内容分发网络服务信息安全管理系统及接口测试方法 - Test specifications of information security management system for content delivery network service
YD/T 3214-2017 - 互联网资源协作服务信息安全管理系统接口规范 - Interface specification for information security management of Internet resource collaboration service
YD/T 3215-2017 - 互联网资源协作服务信息安全管理系统及接口测试方法 - Test methods of information security management system for Internet resource collaboration service
A WFOE = Wholly Foreign-Owned Enterprise is allowed for manufacturing (which I assume Tesla regulates under), but not for Telecom companies where 51% still applies. Internet services seem even worse based on a cursory reading:
(42) No foreign investor is allowed to invest in Internet news services, Internet publishing services, Internet audio-visual program services, Internet culture operation (except music), Internet access service establishments, and services of information release to the public through Internet (except those under China's commitment to opening up to the outside world in its entry into the WTO).Both have stopped happening so many times that the only thing I'm sure about is that they will stop again sometime soon.
so that's probably never going to be 'terminated'
The whole thing was carried out in secret to begin with and Sundar Pichai has been completely silent on how it jives with it's own ethical standards.
Companies don't have ethical standards, only slick PR departments.
Even on HN posts talking about how Apple sells privacy as a product are upvoted and reach > 1000 upvotes.
Apple does not offer a product that spies on user usage all the time monitoring for thought crime, as Web Search just under Chinese law.
Yet nobody cares, as evidenced by the number of companies who do plenty of business in China without backlash. So Google tries to go back to China, and everyone loses their minds.
It's frustrating to be honest, it's as if they're be punished for a good deed they did 10 years ago. If they had just never left, they'd be in the same situation as Apple, where nobody (or magnitudes less, if you want to get pedantic) cares.
I at least hope governments will ban Baidu from ever competing outside of China. I would hate to see Google suffer because they weren't ever allowed to compete with Baidu on their home turf.
[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/google-pulls-out-of-china-20...
"If you open the window, both fresh air and flies will be blown in." 邓小平
That ideology works and benefits China only if there is a disparity between what China is allowed to do in the rest of the world and what China allows the world to do. I am also convinced that restoring an equal relationship is a great way to make the Chinese problem settle on its own.
I think what is more the issue is there are a lot of people on HN who see any criticism of China as nationalistic behavior from Americans at least considering the language our president has chosen to use. Which I would say that is a bad stance to take just because someone else's language is nationalistic on an issue doesn't mean my criticism is. But that seems to be the main issue. Not any particular company just talk around China.
But I agree many of these tech companies are constantly stepping over the line because they have no real competition. Which is why I say break them up.
But when Google all but removed the don't be evil thing from the work of conduct guidelines, that should have been a huge red flag that the company is no longer interested in "educating" its employees on this kind of ethics, and would prefer that its new employees treat the one and only leftover mention of Don't be evil in the work of conduct as what it really is now - a way for Google to say that it's still in there somewhere, and nothing more. The Don't be evil spirit within work of conduct guidelines is gone.
Don’t get too excited; they haven’t announced a lack of participation in PRISM yet.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jun/06/us-tech-giants...
"I’m not sure I can say this more clearly: we’re not in cahoots with the NSA and there’s is no government program that Google participates in that allows the kind of access that the media originally reported. Note that I say “originally” because you’ll see that many of those original sources corrected their articles after it became clear that the PRISM slides were not accurate. Now, what does happen is that we get specific requests from the government for user data. We review each of those requests and push back when the request is overly broad or doesn’t follow the correct process. There is no free-for-all, no direct access, no indirect access, no back door, no drop box."
https://venturebeat.com/2013/06/19/google-issues-clearest-st...
(I work at Google, not in a relevant role.)
Some argue this is just Google following local laws. I say that being legal != being moral and helping the government of China censor and track citizens is not a moral position, law be damned. The amount of internal resistance this got is good evidence of this project not being consistent with the values of most of the people who work there.
The fact that leadership tried to hide this project, keep it secret and deny its existence is... disappointing.
Then again, I already had the opinion that Sundar is the most overpaid CEO in the world.
Technology is driving confrontations with our values, our ideas of what it means to be human.
Organlegging was science fiction, now it's happening.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organlegging
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organ_theft
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organ_transplantation_in_China
"What kind of future do we want?", is no longer the question, because it's here, now.
1) the internal decision making process involving this project
2) personnel who are responsible for initiating / approving the project
3) how many resources have been put into this project
4) the exact content (data sources, roadmap, goals, etc.) of this project
5) how far this project went
6) where the product / data is stored, how will they be handled when the project is terminated
7) how many of the project outputs have being provided to the Chinese government
8) the details of Chinese government involvement into this project
Also, not limited to Google, any U.S. company helps any authoritarian government doing censorship needs to be investigated.
BTW, I got lots of downvotes from comments criticizing China.
Microsoft is run like a regular company where employees just do what they're told.
Under Xi, there is zero chance Google can have a public service offering in any way, considering its history.
The main differences can be summarized as "rule of law" versus "rule of people". Also connections with someone in the upper levels of gov't are paramount for any company looking to make it big.
Source: Chinese family members.
But a big project like this has to gather its requirements somehow. Do google then have dialogue with a representative of the government?
Bing and outlook is (or was at least around 2015) accessible and localized in mainland China.
I wonder how they did it?
To the Chinese people here on HN try to understand that this is larger than the welfare of the Chinese.
China is now in a position to export its culture to the rest of the world due to its economic strength.
It can, for example, force companies like Google to censor information to the rest of the world and this is a fact.
How do I know this? Because us EU citizens already have to suffer the US views on sex and nudity, among others and the US has the strongest free speech protections of all countries.
The whataboutism on this discussion btw is interesting since this forum would be censored in China and this conversation wouldn't be possible. There's no comparison to be made in terms of free speech. In China you have none.
So I regret the situation, but many of us value our liberal freedoms and we don't want China to export its flavor of communism to us.
Yes I was born and raised in an ex-communist country, I know communism when I see it, I don't want any and I'm prepared to fight for my freedoms.
I do hope to see China become a liberal democracy. But I'm not holding my breath, because I also know what it takes for a revolution to happen and China won't be there for the foreseeable future.
[0] RFS 9: Kill Hollywood https://twitter.com/paulg/status/160491053080776706
[1] 2012 Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3491542
https://web.archive.org/web/20120127114157/http://ycombinato...
Bitcoin only. Tether only in high amounts.
I might be confused on the name, and can't look up Crypto stuff at work. Please correct me if I'm wrong.
Yay, capitalism. Where no one's to blame and everything's always on fire.
YouTube has arbitrary content policies which seem to mirror whatever the Democratic party wants. From China's POV they want the same thing except they call their party the Communist party.
Guys like Dennis Prager are trying to run a YouTube channel with conservative viewpoints and are finding it impossible to do so without obstacles. I don't think there is a single channel that is right of center which is not mistreated by YouTube.
Politics aside, let's look at political correctness. On YouTube you cannot be critical about a class of people because of their immigration status. I watched a documentary about of smuggling of illegal immigrants from North Africa into Europe. They showed footage of a guy who couldn't go out into his own farm at night because smugglers would trespass on his property en route to the shore where the boats were. The documentary was one of those "live" launches on YouTube. Conveniently the live launch was bugged out. I had to refresh the page an hour after I realized it didn't release.
24 hours later it was banned by YouTube.
So I ask again, is it only Chinese censorship that western society has a problem with?