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Comment by ALittleLight | Hacker News Reader

Very sad when not even the massively rich will bother to do the right thing. "Sorry, need a few more billion, so we're going to side with an oppressive regime against Democracy."

Reminds me of a Dylan line "Will all the money you made buy back your soul?"

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> Very sad when not even the massively rich will bother to do the right thing.

The issue is Google and Apple isn't owned by one massively rich person.

They are owned by tens of thousands of shareholders, many extremely wealthy but most small, including both individual investors but also pension funds and hedge funds, and the CEO & Board are legally obligated to act in their fiduciary interest.

> legally obligated to act in their fiduciary interest.

Can you provide a citation of which law requires this?

It is probably a bundle of all three, but "duty of good faith" fits the best here.

"The duty to act in good faith is an obligation not only to make decisions free from self-interest, but also free of any interest that diverts the control persons from acting in the best interest of the company."

(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fiduciary#Fiduciary_duties_und...)

Many of those shareholders are diversified and may benefit more from a freer Russia than they lose in short term google profits

> CEO & Board are legally obligated to act in their fiduciary interest.

Short or long term? Because shitting on democracy for money is potentially very damaging for brands in the long term, the market and especially future comptetitors will remember it.

I doubt that is true. The loss in the US versus all the money made in Russia and China? A drop in a sea of money. Also not everyone, especially outside the US, sees this as Democracy Vs. Bad regimes. Many see the US and China as equally bad so doing the US' bidding is no better than doing China's.

Is it? I’d love to believe you, but I doubt it’s the case. Almost every public company that had something to lose would act the same way under these circumstances..

Something to lose right now, but potentially a lot to gain in post smartphone markets, where trust becomes even more important as technology merges more and more with the human body. Brand trust is going to be much more important than it is right now.

> Short or long term? Because shitting on democracy for money is potentially very damaging for brands in the long term, the market and especially future comptetitors will remember it.

In a perfect world this would be the case.

In the real world, their competitors won't exit these markets and will grow to fill the space left by them. This means that their competitors will grow which is probably more of a competitive threat to them in the long term.

i.e. if Google leaves China, the main impact to them would be the rise of TOS+ and the loss of their small market-share in China to Baidu. This would also be playing directly into the chinese government's hands who have a strong foothold on Baidu and Tencent.

I don't believe that for a second. Fiduciary duty prevents corporate officers from enriching themselves at the expense of the company. Fiduciary duty does not compel cooperation with dictators in the suppression of their people.

Can you provide a single example of a civil or criminal charge over something like this?

Usually, we would sanction countries that did this. Maybe time to sanction companies? Otherwise, why do anyone expect them to do anything other than what is the most profitable? Its even illegal not to.

> Usually, we would sanction countries that did this. Maybe time to sanction companies? Otherwise, why do anyone expect them to do anything other than what is the most profitable? Its even illegal not to.

Sanction for what exactly? Sanctions against nations don't work. USA has been sanctioning Cuba, Iran for half a century, no regime change whatsoever, it only hurt the population in these countries. USA are sanctioning Russia right now, is Putin gone? No.

And you want to sanction Apple or Google for what? under what law? Isn't the whole argument made all the time now that these "private companies" are free to censor whoever they want for whatever reasons and they don't have to respect the concept of freedom of speech on their platform?

I agree with you that sanctions against countries don't work.

But then the next logical step is to propose the action that actually works: sanctions against individuals. Perhaps that's what should be done - sanctions against individual decision-makers at Google and Apple?..

That would make the US more of a pariah than it already is. Already most of the west only follow sanctions imposed by the US screaming and kicking unless it plays into their own agenda.

The US government allows Google to operate in Russia (unlike Iran for example). So how can it arbitrarily ’sanction’ employees for complying with the laws of a country their company operates in. Do that sound fair to you? It wouldn’t make any sense.

Not to say I am generally in favour of sanctions, but they did help in South Africa's case.

It wasn't just sanctions in that case, but also boycotts and divestment (via shareholder activism). Which is why Israel is so keen to get US state legislatures to ban speech in favor of the BDS movement.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-BDS_laws

Had Cuba and Iran not been sanctioned it would have been a lot worse.

> Very sad when not even the massively rich will bother to do the right thing.

This is so bizarre, what did people expect here? Apple has been complying with Chinese communist party demands for decades and who knows what Google did. But when it's the Russian government, it's where people on HN draw the line?

These companies certainly want their phones/ecosystem to be sold or used in Russia, they only care about whatever values you think they care about for PR reason in USA. Same for Twitter, Facebook and co.

They are rich for these very reasons, they were never champion of whatever ideals people here think they stand for. Especially Apple, which is a ruthless company with a well oiled marketing machine. People need to wake up to that fact. There is nothing "woke" with these companies other than their PR.

So I hear the argument "well Russia isn't that much of a big market for Apple, Google, and co...". These corporations don't want to make an enemy of the Russian government either.

edit: I'm not defending the actions of the Russian government or Google or Apple caving to their demands, I'd love Russia to be a free and open society. I'm just questioning why is China constantly let off the hook here or in other tech circles, when it always was a brutal dictatorship with no elections to begin with? Is it because westerners relate less to the Chinese because of their race or something? Or because they don't want to admit that THEY directly profit from China's dictatorship and its industry (and capital)? whereas nothing they use gets build in Russia?

Apple gets lambasted for activities in China all the time by many of the same people

> Apple gets lambasted for activities in China all the time by many of the same people

Apple released new iPhones a few days ago, can you point me to the comments on HN on the new iPhone threads talking about their relationship with China?

It's not in every single thread but it's frequently mentioned.

And many of the same people likely buy iPhones.

> and who knows what Google did

We know one thing they did: withdrew from the Chinese market in 2010. Despite it being the second largest economy in the world, and them having an extremely successful search service there.

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