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Comment by delfinom | Hacker News Reader

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delfinom

Yea there's alot of emotional bickering that comes up when a company says "we won't do business with X".

>In other words, Google has a private sanctions regime against smaller countries.

With this stupid statement, my company must have a private sanctions regime agaisnt half the world

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Your company probably isn't as important to the world as Google.

To the point, though: go read the Reuters article[0] linked from TFA. They're not pulling out of Turkey; they're refusing to license software to "business partners" making products for Turkey unless those partners lock search to Google.

Is your company really boycotting half the countries of the world because they have rules in place regarding your business practices?

[0]https://www.reuters.com/article/us-turkey-google/google-warn...

> Your company probably isn't as important to the world as Google.

Google isn't that important to the world. China gets by just fine without it and not having access is mainly a mild inconvenience.

The distinction is that if your company boycotted another, is unlikely to ever be diplomatically or politically important; unless you work at Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, or Google

Or the boycott is part of a common industry practice like Disney/ Netflix distribution rules.

And this is exactly why we should not allow companies to become worldwide monopolies.

I tend to agree - this is similar to when cable companies and television networks have a contract dispute over licenses. Both parties claim the other is being unreasonable and they are the reason you can't watch "channel 257" anymore. In the case of countries in the middle east, there's an added element of obfuscation as there are essentially paid factions in the media willing to carry water for one side or the other. This was one of the many complications for example in unraveling the Khashoggi assassination. Add Russia/Yandex into the mix and it creates another mess that has to get decoded -- i.e. "Russia is the most vigilant party on anti-trust" -- implying that capitalism is alive and well in Russia, while in the US, anti-trust regulators are asleep while large so-called monopoly powers run amok. Yes, there is probably a story behind the story but who do you really trust to tell it to you these days?

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