Yes, that's exactly the problem. What if in the future, my country and USA will be enemies? It is not very probable, but so wasn't a prospect of war in Ukraine, for example. You just don't know how things will develop, and if a company want's to be global, it shouldn't directly support a military of a specific country.
There might be national secret-sauce here or there, but the major military contractors are all international. Lots of projects involve R&D spread across multiple nations. Things mostly get dicey when looking at nations that are too unstable to trust (Egypt, Pakistan, etc.), or those that are current rivals (Russia, China).
Is that trusting one's friends or are they too unstable to trust?
Trusting an ally with any version of the F-35 is a big thing. The base F-35 is still going to be a very great fighter aircraft.
Even since resolution there's unprecedented restrictions of maintenance in RAF service, requiring some major components returned to BAe in the US when BAe are a British based company.
I'm on my way out but a quick search seems to show Israel as having the least restricted version, which is a surprise: https://www.wired.com/2016/05/israel-can-customize-americas-...
Some discussion of the Blair era issues: https://www.defenseindustrydaily.com/uk-warns-usa-over-itar-...
Just because Israel is allowed to add additional equipment to the F-35 doesn't mean anything in terms of the F-35 itself. Which, as I said, is the same as everyone else's.
Eu companies do the same German pro union at home hire dodgy American union busters in the UK for example
... but practically and on the ground, the Google employee base is large and international enough that there may very well be employees with friends or relatives in US military hot-zones where the US has not successfully demonstrated sufficient care about civilian casualties. Their desire to only work for the company in relatively peaceful times is pretty understandable.
Nobody wants to wake up one morning and realize they're an IBM employee in 1940.
Does anyone not think of Toyota as Japanese? General Electric is certainly an MNC, but they are quite proudly "American" as is Volkswagen proudly "German."
So, it's silly to think that MNC's, by virtue of their MNC nature, jettison their national allegiance in the ultimate case.
If you want to make the case that they should be truly "multi-national", then we're off to my favorite possible dystopian world, where a corporation becomes a sovereign entity with the power of a state, which is the ultimate conclusion of such thinking.
A multi-national company is still responsible to multiple nations in differing amounts though, no? It shouldn't mean "responsible to no one." And America quite clearly should have some significant claim on Google, even if it isn't all of it (or necessarily even a majority). Furthermore, most of the those non-American countries that Google should be accountable to (i.e. most democratic countries and most developed countries... as that is from where it draws revenue and employees) rely, in large part, on the US military for their own national security.
>There's also a real chance that I might get hit by a brick and die tomorrow, yet that doesn't stop me from going out.
This misses the point entirely--which was that whether or not the US military is good or bad for the world is a complicated and difficult question to answer. At the very least, this is clear from the large number of democratic countries who have chosen to mostly rely on the US military for their own national security. So the apparent certainty in the moral correctness of those refusing to work on technology for it is unjustified.
Again, I'm not saying that these employees are necessarily making the incorrect moral decision. I'm saying that the conversations on this topic seem to overlook a lot of the ethical difficulties associated with their choice.
You've been using your military the get cheap resources in the midfle east, ever since the cold war.
So I dont want to work for such a military, even in proxy.
I often wonder if statements like this are disingenuous. The US military "polices" parts of the world where American interests lie; ie Natural resources, supply chains, potential markets for American companies to exploit. When you say countries "choose" American military protection you are not considering the considerable economic pressure America can leverage when it wants something you have. In developing countries this can be a difficult choice too. By not spending on military you can spend elsewhere. Even if that means resources end up in the hands of politicians directly; which is no different to any first world country.
A similar difference to the one that motivated its even longer occupation of the oil-less Afghanistan.
So what stops me, as a Google customer (which I am), to stop doing business with them, given that I see proof after proof that they are working against my interests?
This is the same problem as with the Snowden leaks. I don't care if Americans feel more safe with the NSA secretly watching their emails via gag orders, if my privacy as a non-US citizen is being violated, therefore at this point absolutely all US companies are suspects, starting with a negative ranking in my book; at this point I always prefer European ones. Also the usual arguments that countries collaborate with each other is bullshit, because in the EU I can sue companies, or my government, for cheap too, whereas in the US I have no rights.
And if you find that acceptable, then maybe balkanizing the Internet isn't such a bad thing after all, lets start with ICANN.
> There's also a real chance (though perhaps small) that an industry-wide refusal to cooperate with the US military could have disastrous consequences for the world
There's also a real chance that I might get hit by a brick and die tomorrow, yet that doesn't stop me from going out.
If you don't have an assessment done by experts of what might actually happen, then such arguments are bullshit.