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Comment by jimbob45 | Hacker News Reader

I can understand the copyright stuff because Google can’t possibly afford the fight against the MPAA/RIAA. Why wade into politics though? What gain does Google obtain through political censorship?

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I’m going to take a guess that perhaps it has to do with Google’s ability to continue to commercially operate in China.

Perhaps X leadership from Google spoke with Y leadership from China and reached this compromise in order to avoid a potential all-out ban of Google’s services in China, similar to - though nowhere close to the same reasoning behind - the US’ ban of Huawei telecommunications equipment.

PLEASE NOTE that this is purely conjecture. I am not affiliated with Google or China, in any way, shape, or form. This should not be taken as fact.

I would guess also that it has to do with "normalizing" relationships with China as well. Every country has skeletons in its closet. And every government seeks to rationize and minimize those skeletons as much as possible. As a country gains stake in mefia institutions, those institutions internalize some of the propaganda of that country.

This skeleton is not in the closet, it’s on the front yard and still being punched in the face every day. Meaning they have not stopped oppressing which is needed for it to be a skeleton in the closet.

My comment is not to minimize the oppression. It is rather to point out that other countries, engaging in similar oppression and dehumanization have managed their PR in such a way that they don't need to twist the arm of a company like Google to ensure their preferred vocabulary is used. It is the status quo. China is doing the work now of integrating itself with the "free" media to ensure a certain image. A country like the US did so decades ago.

Is any part of Google still operating in China? All Google domains are blocked in China. If you use an Android device in China with Google Play Services (or microG), you will not receive any push notifications through Firebase Cloud Messaging unless you use a VPN (or equivalent), and many VPNs are blocked or throttled to an unusable level. Even Android's internet connectivity check is broken in AOSP, since the Great Firewall blocks the android.com domain, which hosts the test page.

I was going to say this as well. I, too, am neither affiliated with Google or China. This very much sounds like a, "I'll scratch your back if you scratch mine," kind of thing IMHO.

The article explains which YouTube policies the removed videos violated, so there is no need to conjecture.

Pretty sure they're still trying really hard to get GCP functional in mainland China, somehow. You know, like how Amazon/AWS made it: https://www.amazonaws.cn/en/

You think it's more expensive to fight the MPAA/RIAA than the Chinese government?

Follow the money.

if the pandemic and 180 turnaround on the ability to speak about covid not coming from natural occurrence didn't wake you up to the idea that these platforms think they are the arbiter of truth, nothing will.

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