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Comment by aaa_aaa | Hacker News Reader

I always wondered why did google involved with this project. It's a small amount of money and risky considering backlash, it is supposedly public use related. Why not leave it to usual guys who would jot question shady deals? What compelled Google when it came to state of Israel?

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Every contract with a national government buying whole data centers for cloud services is a major one with big numbers attached. This is not a small amount of money and the backlash to date has yet to be impactful.

If you want to be a major cloud player - and Google does - you need to be willing to do what other major cloud players do and sell to national governments. AWS, Oracle, and other hyperscalers all do.

There's a difference between "selling to governments" and "selling to governments who are actively committing genocide".

Certainly... it's just that anyone with any real knowledge/power knows that isn't happening (see the leaders of basically every consequential democracy from Germany to USA, even Ukraine).

"Everybody in the US's alliance structure agrees that the US's top Middle-East ally is behaving completely appropriately, which is strong evidence that they are. I am very smart."

I'm not appealing to authority, I'm stating a fact. But even if I were, there certainly isn't a better 'alliance structure' to appeal to. In any case, it's a good thing your opinion on the matter is essentially meaningless (as is mine) which was the only point I was really making.

What I'm disagreeing with in your statement is the conflation of "real knowledge" with "power." It is true that all the most powerful governments in the West have taken roughly the same line on the charge of genocide in Gaza, but it is not at all the case that everyone with "real knowledge" has agreed with them.

As I said, there certainly isn't a better 'alliance structure' to appeal to. To suggest otherwise is to suggest conspiracy and I'll have none of that

Correct. You shouldn't decide whether there's a genocide going on in Gaza by consulting official statements from interested governments. You should decide based on independent human rights researchers, international law scholars, journalists, and so on. Opinion on the subject among these people is very much split.

Is there any other state Google made this kind of work?

After a brief bit of research, Google also works extensively with US and UK governments. I would expect there's also quite a list of other rich-world governments that Google sells cloud services to.

Israel's only really special here in that it's far more objectionable to many people. To your other point, corrupt African countries are generally not stumping up billions of dollars for cloud computing, even if we assume Google would want to do business there.

There's actually a not particularly visible - but very real - sector of large companies that hire hyperscalers to build them private clouds. Those deals wind up looking very similar to Project Nimbus. Examples:

* https://www.oracle.com/cloud/cloud-at-customer/dedicated-reg... * https://aws.amazon.com/dedicatedlocalzones/

I think they should publish the Google services used by IDF, that way GCloud customers can also rely on them, because Google is not going to shutdown those services. It won't be appearing in killedbygoogle, I guess.

If Google performed morality tests on its customers before selling to them then the company would have exactly $0 in revenue.

But this seems like a special deal. Would they do the same for say an African country with human rights issues for the same money? I don't think so.

Israel also has an anti-protest clause in the contract, to keep Google in the contract in face of any protests or demonstrations.

Not doubting but do you have a link?

Yeah, I've seen that mentioned as well, and am curious about the details. This techcrunch article[1] states "... strict contractual stipulations that prevent Google and Amazon from bowing to boycott pressure". That could be read as contract terms that don't mention anything about protest/boycott but rather just set a fixed term of contract, with penalties for terminating the contract. However, it also isn't uncommon for contracts with Israel to include anti-BDS clauses, and California has an anti-BDS law[2], which it could also be referring to.

[1] https://techcrunch.com/2024/04/18/google-fires-28-employees-...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-BDS_laws

https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/israel-government...

> When asked if the companies could shut down services, attorney Zviel Ganz of the legal department at the Finance Ministry said such scenarios had been taken into consideration when formulating the tenders.

> “According to the tender requirements, the answer is no,” he said, adding that the contracts also bar the firms from denying services to particular government entities.

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