Comment by Karunamon | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Karunamon | Hacker News Reader

Before the doom and gloomers start (looking below I'm a bit late, but anyways..), think about this from a practical perspective.

We can assume two things as indisputable facts: 1) Google is a multinational company. 2) To operate in a given country necessitates complying with that country's laws.

If a local country's laws say that you can't deny the holocaust (Germany) or speak ill of the king (Thailand) or talk about how corrupt the government is (Russia), or link to something that might be copyrighted (USA), or what have you, Google's options are limited to either compliance, or ceasing operations there.

What do you think would happen if Google took a public hardass stance like "We refuse to censor user content under any circumstances"? Admirable, and that would make them a darling on the internet, but only as long as it took for the local apparatchik to note that the company is violating local laws, and shuts down their operations there or worse.

Google's best bet in this case is exactly what they've done here - try to limit the spread of the local censorship from its local area. Just because Thailand's king gets easily butthurt is no reason for people outside of Thailand to suffer for the actions of a partially corrupt regime there..

If you have a better (and most importantly REALISTIC) idea, I'd love to hear it.

I believe Google has a moral responsibility to fight censorship. I understand your stance, and it makes sense under the assumption that Google should do what's best for themselves (and shareholders), but that's wrong. Following local law doesn't absolve them of that evil.

Edit: In response to having a better idea, Google isn't a powerless agent in this situation. They can take a hard stance without being completely cut out of that country. It may suck short-term, but it creates a better Internet long-term and that matters for them.

You absolutists have really tied their hands. There is no country with a concept of something being more illegal than something else - there is only legal and illegal with (theoretically) higher sentences for worse crimes. Denying the hololcaust in Germany is just as much of a crime as fraud.

I'd hate to be in Google's shoes right now. They can't win. If they keep going in a country despite the laws, they'll just be shut down and then the shareholders (and anyone else with a rational mind) will be miffed. If they follow the law, the shareholders will be happy, but some people in some areas will have their rights trampled on.

I think your fight is with the government passing corrupt laws that everyone is beholden to, not the company following the law like everyone else.

Asking a company to break local laws on principal sounds nice, but in the real world, it isn't gonna happen, for a number of very good reasons.

I don't identify as an absolutist and I agree it's not a black-and-white situation. It sucks for the reasons you mention.

But even if it's their legal obligation to follow, I still believe it's morally wrong for them to do so. Their position isn't so weak that they're powerless. As a business their incentives may be really strong, but I don't believe that absolves them of the moral component. Just because taking a hard stance is hard doesn't mean it's OK not to take it. But it is understandable, certainly for a complex, multifaceted organization.

And I agree, it's not just about Google. I think everyone shares at least some responsibility, from the government to the businesses to the citizens. But just because it's practical for Google to censor doesn't mean they are no longer morally responsible for taking part in censorship.

Hopefully Google will at least be active in fighting the laws and maybe that is their full intention.

What, specifically, would you have them do? Are you advocating a full hard-line stance? That they will not take down anything, ever? Or that they won't take down things if they feel the reason is political oppression? Or what?

Those questions are not rhetorical. You haven't said, really, what you believe their moral obligation is, only that they are falling short of it.

I don't think it helps to talk about censorship in the abstract. We can start with the position that "all censorship is bad", but we quickly get into the same tricky problems that first amendment cases do (where do my rights end and yours begin), not to mention that "free speech" is literally defined differently in different countries.

Next, we can look at things like if censoring certain types of material is ever wrong. Citizens reporting on each other for anti-patriotic behavior horrifies us, but I have no problem with Google reporting a site that hosts child pornography if they discover it while indexing images (I don't agree with the thoughtcrime laws that child pornography seems to engender, but I certainly have no problem with that site being shut down).

Since we're looking at an American company, what about DMCA take down notices? Many on this site have serious problems with the way those laws are enforced and in how they favor large content conglomerates, but if companies were to not follow them, large segments of companies on the internet simply could not exist (if based in the US). Is it morally wrong for them to honor these takedown notices? What if most are in fact legitimate (in our copyright system, not some platonic one!), they just deny due process to some minority? Is there a moral difference between a court order and a national security notice?

There's an easy transition from these questions to ones of censoring hate speech and incitement to violence, to censoring Holocaust-denial and Nazism, to censoring criticism of the King.

If we're going to draw a bright line for companies we will financially support, we'll have to talk about specifics, because "censorship" won't cut it (what did you fund with your taxes this year?), and we really are going to have to talk about "I don't want an American company censoring blog posts in India because I think the laws there (that some portion of the population likely supports) are wrong". And then we'll have to call up someone in the EU that supports "the right to forget" and see what they think of our notion of free speech and censorship.

Google's mission is to "organise the world's information". If that's the case, isn't allowing special interest groups the power to alter what information is presented a violation of that mission?

"Organise the world's information, except where it makes some people butthurt" is a much less attractive proposition.

What's a worse blow to "organizing the world's information"?

Removing a few things at the request of some government twits, or being shut down country by country?

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