I don't know what the right move here is. Nobody who thinks there's an obvious right answer is worth listening to.
Google got hacked by inside actors planted in their physical offices by the Chinese government. It's one of the very few times that Gmail's security was compromised. At the time, Google did not have the security countermeasures in place to protect against such an attack so they responded by severing the physical ties so such an attack could not be repeated. Once the BeyondCorp initiative had completed and they had the technology necessary to firewall pieces of their infrastructure where users had admin rights from other pieces of their infrastructure where users had admin rights, they reopened business in China because the risk model had changed.
This just isn't true? It was an IE 0-day.
I would rather American companies not get so comfortable with blatant censorship. While we do still have some degree of censorship (and a whole lot pf privacy violation), it’s still generally seen as a taboo and not as a moral or necessary thing.
Once the social standards change however, the goalpost moves and it becomes harder to maintain the same freedoms we had before.
I mean, maybe, but since the US has the least-restricted speech of basically any nation, you are de-facto asking for a nationally partitioned internet. That's a big change.
That would be a little ironic since it was the US who pushed for such laws in post-war Germany in the first place.
Meta will not violate American law. As citizens, our most effective tool is our government of the people.
The idea that we rely on culture or corporate benevolence to maintain our freedoms, and not our representatives and laws... it's insane, to the say the least. I'd prefer to elect the people to protect my freedoms, not hope a for-profit advertising company will do so automatically.
> I would rather the American people elect a government that will protect their rights through laws.
I would also like a world where problems don't exist, but that doesn't change the real world. It's a naive take. The world is complicated.
> Meta will not violate American law.
This is both demonstrably false and borderline meaningless.
False because they have and will, unless you're suggesting Meta/Facebook has NEVER broken a law. It's just a question of whether they got charged/sued for it.
It's meaningless because laws can be highly interpretable, unenforceable, impractical... and the playing field is constantly changing, so there's always a new opportunity for new types of violations.
That isn't to say laws are meaningless, obviously they are extremely necessary and must be enforced, but the public response to those ambiguous situations is what would help determine the next set of laws/norms.
> The idea that we rely on culture or corporate benevolence to maintain our freedoms...
Parent comment doesn't suggest this. "Corporate culture" has little to do with it. American culture is what would change, has changed, and is changing. When the tooling is developed to carry out efficient, sweeping censorship, it will be used. With more use, we become more comfortable with it and even see it as a necessary evil. Currently there is public outrage when a tech company censors information. How long will this remain interesting enough to draw our attention? TSA in airports after 9/11 is a good example of this.
Example:
>> I would rather the American people elect a government that will protect their rights through laws.
>I would also like a world where problems don't exist, but that doesn't change the real world. It's a naive take. The world is complicated.
What in the hell kind of reply is this? How dare you. (On the day that the EU fined Google 4 billion Euros, largest in history, demonstrating laws and governments of people, no less). Your nonsensically dismissive reply is immature and entirely unfit for this community. Take this tripe back to reddit.
Shame on you for how you behaved here.
All I will say is that in being offended by a rather benign comment, you have yourself committed what you accuse me of.
We're all looking for ways to censor spammers or belligerents from internet forums. It could easily start there and spread to other areas.
We had a breakdown in our consensus mechanism — because the government partnered with corporations to censor rather than allow public debate.
The nation is still bitterly divided.
How long do you think US companies could operate in the US if they weren't government-obedient? Or any company in any country for that matter.
It is and always has been the intersection of realpolitik and greed.
But if the answer is trite snark that summarizes evil vs obvious good, they haven't done that work, and I won't listen, no.
Or would you like to have Iran or Pakistan or whatever intervening in the domestic issues of the West?
I can't go to a museum, admire the bravery of, say, Sophie Scholl, and then go "ah yes, but at the end of the day it's not really anyone's business", and you cannot both have the dignity of a person who accepts the responsibility they have just by virtue of being human and shut yourself off.
At the end of the day, it's just a rationalization for kicking away the ladder. You don't care what happens to them as long as it doesn't happen to you or people you love. That is what it is, and all it is.
It's a massive regression from 2002 - 2021, but this is not true. The Taliban has moderated somewhat from 2000 (somewhat), and frankly would be very happy to make tactical deals with the west to help counter ISIS.