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Comment by PakG1 | Hacker News Reader

EXACTLY the same thing. It's a really interesting point. When China does it, they're horrible. When the US does it, what is it? Is there a difference or not? The motivations are quite similar, and one probably can only look at whether the motivations of each country can be justified from a moral standpoint.

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Perhaps the discontent comes because China is seen as something of an expeditionary market for American search providers. While you can give China the finger and get out, it's not tenable to do that in the US, so one is compelled to play by American rules.

I don't necessarily believe that China's status as an expeditionary market makes it worthwhile to stop offering services in that country, just playing devil's advocate I guess.

Collaboration with a bad government is always optional, you can cease to do business. That's definitely tenable. It takes a lot of balls to do so.

Imagine google coming right out and saying: 'Our do no evil motto is our guiding light and we have decided that being forced by the government to act in this manner to prevent our technology from being used to spy on American citizens in ways that we can not in good conscience allow is against our principles. Therefore we will cease operating today.'.

I'm trying to imagine the effect of such a move, it strikes me that the ensuing fall-out would probably see the government as the losing party and google re-instated in very short order.

Sometimes you have to make a stand, if the same thing was a good enough reason for google to cease to do business in China then maybe it should be good enough to cease doing business in the US.

They could have made more of a fuss over it. Get ideas up in the air about shifting pieces of Google overseas, for example. Once the idea that Google might be locating somewhere else for concern about collaborating with the US government, public concern might have been raised.

The reality is that governments do have the ability to dictate a lot. But companies are global now and that means some competition exists. It's old news that countries compete on tax laws but competing on rights and freedoms would be nice too. To a certain extent, they do.

Google Iceland has a nice ring to it.

Also the economy there could use a boost I believe.

Why even bother to shut down? Google could probably just go "Haha! Fuck you. Who's your closest supervisor in an elected office?" Next day, "<Official> wants Google to share your personal information with the Federal Government" magically becomes the top hit for that name.

Bureaucrats and spooks are happy to play this game because they know it never comes back to them. Nobody who has to answer to voters would dare put their name on it-- we're looking for any damn excuse to not vote for the incumbent this cycle.

But I guess standing up for us could mean a hit to shareholder value, and some things just aren't worth sacrificing.

Nobody who has to answer to voters would dare put their name on it?

Remember that 99-1 vote for the Patriot Act? The one senator who voted against, Russ Feingold, lost in 2010 to a guy who's campaign slogan revolved heavily around "freedom".

There are many dimensions of freedom. I'll note that Sen. Feingold's name shares a place in "McCain-Feingold", which is a limitation on free speech (some may argue that it's a warranted limitation, but the fact that it is a limitation on freedom is objectively true)

Yeah, I know that some people consider limiting campaign contributions to be more damaging to freedom than creating the legal framework for a modern day KGB. I think those people are ignorant.

Fascism and communism didn't kill 100 million people because of a 2300 dollar limit on campaign contributions.

Perhaps they did so because of a total ban on advocacy ads within X days of the election? We wouldn't want people to hear about what a snake their Congressman is, when the election is close enough they might remember.

There's a heck of a lot more to McCain-Feingold than just a $2300 limit.

I very much doubt that Google threatening to pull out of the country would cause any action in Congress. The government has no incentive to act, and all the power to spin the story if there is some sort of public outcry - something to the effect of "Google is unpatriotic and doesn't care about your safety." Most people will buy it.

If anything, Microsoft would just step in to fill the vacuum with Bing, and business would continue as usual for everyone but Google.

Gmail.

That's why I'm sayin' they can't just leave, and they can't just threaten. It has to be real civil disobedience. They have to be willing to say:

No, we're not going to do that. You'll have to shut us down, which will take years, and cost the economy millions of jobs and trillions of dollars.

Oh, and I hope it goes without saying that we won't be complying with any court orders related to this matter. If you're serious about doing this, there will be pictures of men pointing guns at innocent American technicians, right next to the headline "The Feds are Coming for Your Email," and underneath that, Senator, will be your name.

Then they'd say something like: "This is America, motherfucker. Land of the free. You can't get away with this shit."

...sigh. At least it'd make a good screenplay.

Look at this from the opposite direction.

You want a big multi-billion $ business to start dictating your laws?

Good luck on that one, that's not going to end badly is it?

Don't they already ? Every multi-billion $ business has lobbyists that dictate the law.

Big multi-billion $ businesses can only exist in a society where a big government can enable them using bailouts, quid pro quo campaigning and cost-prohibitive compliance for frivolous regulation.

From a societal POV, big anything is bad. I wish more open-minded people could recognize that fact.

That's not true at all; many (probably most) huge companies have never received bailouts. Compliance is also a tricky issue - you don't want to let the market compete on nuclear power plant design without some sort of supervision, even if the current system doesn't work very well. Lobbyists are a different story, but Google, for example, or Amazon, got to where they are without leaning on governmental support or anti-competitive laws.

A big multi-billion $ business deciding to dictate its own behavior or end is not the same as dictating law, even if the law reacts by changing in order to preserve the business.

The current system, where corporations often actually, literally dictate many laws is a lot less open and straightforward.

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