Following laws is normal, but Tim Cook shouldn't both comply on censorship, and right after promote an "open internet" conference hosted by the government that just told you remove the VPN from your app store.
China doesn't have rule of law, it rules BY law. Laws and their enforcement apply differently if you're local company or foreign company. Also differently whether you're in good terms with the government or not (this is probably why Cook even showed up at this conference to begin with).
If they want to shut you down they can just pile on unreasonable demands until you quit. Try applying for a journalist Visa without connections in mainland China to get a taste if this kind of functioning.
To have a company in China you need local partners, and you will have to give up your IP at some point.
Apple and Microsoft are still welcome because Apple creates tons of jobs and Microsoft runs on all the computers. If they loose that and still step on Chinese companies market, the tone would change quickly
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Because the community is Western-oriented and most of us are rather ignorant of things Chinese, I'm sure that many things people say on China topics can be hard to take. Nevertheless, we can't have nationalistic flamewars. If you know more, the thing to do is to teach us, in a good spirit. If you can't or don't want to do that, that's fine, but then please refrain from posting. I realize that it's not easy to hold a minority viewpoint under such conditions, but it's not in your interest to break the rules like this; it ends up representing your viewpoint in a bad way, which doesn't help.
the imprint of their naked feet / in the desert sand / will outlast the silhouettes / of your bombs and tanks
That goes for everybody, everywhere. Past, present, future. Identifying with a nation, religion or race is not a sign of greatness, it's a sign that a person didn't get to develop. Having reached the local optimum available to you does not equal maturity, having no room left to grow does not mean you're big. Tens of billions multiplied by zero still equals zero.
Complying with the local laws is basically just greed when the laws are so far against your own core values
The point I am trying to make is that prevalent HN view against censorship is not something Apple leadership cares about enough to leave the market.
Baidu best google because they were allowed to not follow local law, being a chinese company, and got popular on porn as well as rich in healthcare scams.
Well google did not want to follow local law not because of their moral stand but because their business relies on gathering information about their customers, and thats different from Apple who mostly justs want to sell things to people.
Will they start to get the boot too?
Technically, Google didn't "leave" China either, they simply moved Google.cn to Hong Kong. The fact that mainland Chinese can't easily access Google without VPNs (now banned, helped along by Apple) is a political decision and doesn't have anything to do with Google. No one in the world has problems using Google.hk except those in the mainland.
Apple's behavior here is quite unethical no matter how you slice it. They are aiding and abetting a censorship regime that is cracking down even harder recently than it was previously. The centralized app store model makes it even worse, rather than better, as on the PC and Android, you can still side load apps or run linux, in order to avoid government mandated surveillance and censorship (In Xinjiang province, the government recently went as far as to mandate everyone install a backdoor or face jail time and fines)
Just wanting to sell things to people isn't an excuse, if in doing so, you are lending credibility and legitimacy to a unethical behavior. And frankly, the asymmetrical way many Western tech and media companies are blocked in China is frankly an unfair trade practice. Wasn't joining the WTO supposed to come with some kind of tit-for-tat agreements? That in exchange for lowering of tariffs and import regulations, there has to be some reciprocity on the other side?
Apple can still make their phones in China, but if they had a backbone, they'd say, no, "open internet" does not mean "we will help ban all VPNs from our store so Chinese consumers have NO CHOICE." and refuse the order, and let China ban the App Store. They could then allow a side-load model that decentralizes control so that the government can't even force them to censor.
In the US, they've marketed themselves as being anti-surveillance and proudly implemented cryptographic techniques in ways that even they can't break them. Allowing Chinese to sideload apps would allow them to say to the government "we can't stop people from using VPNs, we can't control what they download and install via side loading"
Sadly, that ship may have sailed, but IMHO, standing for your principles is better than selling out for money. They've already got $200 billion in cash in the bank and aren't hurting for revenue.
It hasn't been competing. Businesses that use AWS are forced into using competing inferior services. Part of what killed Red5Studios was not having capital to survive that transition.
Oh, I like this statement.
Because based on the same statement, if Cook wants to make money in a country where been gay will be punished by death[0][1], he must be smiling like a sunflower when he standing in front of a gay couple who will soon be executed because of, well, local law.
Very delightful, Huh?
[0] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2016/06/13... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_penalty_for_homosexualit...