Define that. For regular people in China, does the addition of Google with some censorship make their life better? Does it improve information flow over existing domestic search engines? I think the answer is obvious.
People subscribe to overly simplistic thinking - if something is not perfect, it must be the worst. I see a lot of people promoting sanctions on a country because of government. Who gets hurt in this case? Ordinary people living their life.
When the information flow is all-or-nothing (either you get the full uncensored fire-hose, or you get nothing and whole sites/services are blocked due to censorship), the citizen at least knows they're being censored, and then the ball is in the citizens' court as to whether they want to advocate for a reform of that censorship.
When censorship is selective (e.g. "You can read all of Wikipedia, except for whichever articles the government doesn't currently like this week/year"), citizens are mostly going to be unaware of what they're missing and how selective their worldview might actually be. This is very insidious, stealthy, and difficult for a citizenry to be aware of and politically revolt against, especially given there will commonly be no transparency or oversight as to the banned-topic list at any given moment.
Personally, one of my stronger meta-values is that any state which stands on the side of forcibly hiding information from its citizens is on the wrong side of history and ethics. If you can only defend your government to its citizens by lying to them, there's clearly something wrong with what you're doing.
Also I don't think that posturing that may lead up to another Cold War is good for the world. Perhaps there can be greater understanding between peoples through a process of engagement, rather than standing-off.
There is a famous commencement speech by Solzentzyn at Harvard, that laments why the West, esp Americans haven't shown understanding of other cultures, and seem to think and act from a position of moral superiority, whose basis is not so sound as they think.
When a government is unelected, it needs to show its legitimacy through strength. This means censoring anything that would make it look weak. Censorship is simply a political tool by the CCP, not a cultural practice that deserves respect.
In fact, you could argue that political censorship is the actual enemy of Chinese culture. Historically, China has had a rich history of political theory and thought, but now any views that go against the party line are repressed.
Personally, I think Google is in an awkward position here. The Wikipedia can take a solid and principled stance because it has clear and transparent policy on what it censors (basically anything original, not NPOV, and not of general interest). The Wikipedia can do this, because it's edited by humans, and while humans are pretty bad at agreeing at these things, they're way better at it than computers.
Basically, Google wants to filter its results, but if it doesn't let the Chinese government control the filter in China, it runs the risk of appearing to be western propaganda.
Since your argument revolve around this, do you know if this is correct? As in, people in China does not know they're being censored?
What does scare me though, is that by accepting censorship, it normalizes it and weakens the position of any company protesting against it even in countries that traditionally are more pro-human rights like European countries and the US. So it is a complex question...
Really? China's a huge country with huge differences in income and education. I wouldn't be surprised at all if there are some people who aren't aware of the censorship or others even outside of the government that feel like it's a good policy. Mainly curious how small that population is.
What does that have to do with ethics, really? Your argument seems to be that utility should outweigh ethical concerns.
> I see a lot of people promoting sanctions on a country because of government. Who gets hurt in this case? Ordinary people living their life.
So do you think governments were wrong to sanction South Africa's apartheid regime? Do you not think that the ordinary people in South Africa have a better life today as a result of those sanctions and the collapse of the apartheid regime?
It's called utilitarianism and here it demonstrates nicely that ethics comes in various flavors
Some would argue that denying people the ability to access information easily is unethically harming them. It preserves your own privilege instead of extending it to the less well off.
There are real ethical questions here that can be weighed. It's perhaps not quite as simple for some people as money on one side and every single possible ethical factor on the other.
Not GP, but that seems a bit unfair. Utilitarianism in various flavours is a popular ethical framework; for those who subscribe to it, ethical concerns are properly calibrated and measured in utility.
I suspect your argument (especially the SA comparison) would be better expressed as a tension between long- and short-term utility, but don't want to put words into your mouth.
Yes their lives are much better, just like the Zimbabweans.
It's the Chinese firewall censoring the sites, so even if Google did link the site in the search results, users wouldn't be able to click and access it.
The bigger issue with project dragonfly was sharing user search queries with the government. This seems terrifying but pretty much every other tech company (Amazon, Microsoft, Apple, etc.) existing in China does this with their Chinese user data.
That's why this is a red herring. The problem you want to solve is Chinese citizen awareness when Google is just trying to provide the information that's available.
And before you ask, there were large technical and ethical differences in my opinion with the censorship of nazi results in germnny vs the censorship that China demands- for one thing, the Chinese government needed real-time control and could have been involved in the process of putting the results together. That kind of product compromise isn’t anything I want to work on personally. I’m not going to work on something that lies in real time to people about the quality of the air they are breathing, using the google brand, for example.
I don't think so. If Chinese people want to use Google, then they have to use a VPN. And if Chinese people use a VPN, their search results won't be censored.
If Google releases a censored search engine in China, then people will have less incentive to access an uncensored one.
For a cartoonish example let's say Adolf Hitler approaches you to buy large quantities of morphine as a substitute for Zyklon B. Surely this is an improvement for the victims of extermination over their current situation, but you're still participating in the Holocaust.
I think utilitarianism has a big problem with myopia. It's extremely hard to do a real global calculation for outcomes so faithful practitioners inevitably end up following local gradients. I think a solid ethical equilibrium requires a certain amount of deontology, a framework of things that We Do Not Do.
Sometimes I think this is a result of information explosion. People gets overwhelmed by the amount of available information, so as a self-protection mechanism, they subscribe to the simplest binary thought process.
And other people might think that since it adds a tiny positive in one area that it can't possible add a huge negative in another area--like normalizing censorship for profit (whoops, the horse already left that barn) and massively increasing the surveillance capabilities of a murderous oppressive regime. You're engaging in simplistic thinking too.
I think the answer is obvious, but in the opposite sense you imply. Google acts as a window into the universe. Not the only one, of course. But if you have a window into the universe that lies to you about the universe (and of course, assuring you that I will tell you everything that is important, and then omitting certain important things, is lying), it is best for you to be without it, and rely on whatever windows you have left.
ahem...
> People subscribe to overly simplistic thinking
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appeasement