This exactly.
I would even make a stronger case. It's not fair to expect a technology company to fight a major world economic power. This is a failure of US and EU governments. They should pressure China to liberalize their government and provide a level economic playing field (it is insane what China gets away with with respect to the roadblocks it places on Western companies to do business there).
Do you have no sense of your own hypocrisy? I am certain you have 0 qualms in using and buying Chinese manufactured products, or buying services and products from companies that operate in China. And yet here we are with you lecturing from your soapbox on who should be or shouldn't be ashamed of their actions. Look to yourself first before moralizing at others.
A company making toothbrush is different from a company helps censorship.
The point is what a company does, not where it operates.
You have no choice?
>and justifying unethical behavior.
I get it. It's not unethical when you engage in commerce with a regime you find unethical, or when you buy from all the other companies that manufacture their goods in China ... but it's unethical if Google doesn't want to ignore 1.4 billion people?
>The fact that this is the only sentence you've touched speaks for itself.
As opposed to the other three snide and arrogant sentences? If you'd like a good-faith discussion please lead by example.
Who says it's not unethical? Why are you putting words in peoples' mouths?
On one hand you talk about having a good-faith discussion but then you go ahead and base your argument off of words you've put in someone else's mouth.
> but it's unethical if Google doesn't want to ignore 1.4 billion people?
Most people find corruption of data far worse than the absence of data. I'd rather not be told anything than be told a lie.
OK. I guess I made the reasonable assumption that buying Chinese goods or buying goods from companies that do business in Chinese is not intrinsically unethical since it is something is completely pervasive. The fact that neither the public, nor democratic governments, nor any companies have any qualms
So I'm sorry if I stumbled upon a hypocrite who hates himself for engaging in the unethical action of living in a modern globalized society.
>On one hand you talk about having a good-faith discussion
I sure do and still do. You tell me, was OP's first comment a good-faith start to a discussion? If not, why are you hassling me? Because you agree with OP - that's the standard here?
>Most people find corruption of data far worse than the absence of data.
Got stats for that? Or are we projecting how we feel on the rest of the world.
But to rephrase it, do you think Chinese citizens should have the option to use the same products that their peers in other countries do? The actual point I made however had a different focus, mainly - do you think a company who competes with other companies can just ignore a market of 1.4 billion people when none of their other competitors do? Companies go bankrupt all the time. Even a multinational Fortune 100 company will have a life expectancy of 40-50 years. So the entire point was: - No western government hasn't taken steps to isolate this 'unethical' regime. - The public is perfectly fine with travelling to China, buying from China, doing business with companies who do business in China. - All of Google's competitors are in China.
But Google is evil because they only lasted 8 years of their self-imposed exile (and if you remember, their leaving China was precipitated by Chinese hacking attack against their servers).
Turn your mouse around. Where is it made? This is true since it was a joke in the 90s.
> I get it. It's not unethical when you engage in commerce with a regime you find unethical, or when you buy from all the other companies that manufacture their goods in China ... but it's unethical if Google doesn't want to ignore 1.4 billion people?
I never said it's not unethical. You say that I say that. Which is quite weak. I hope this is the result of you realizing what you did and now trying to dig yourself out by shifting blame to others.
What was the last time Western interventionism brought any good for the world? Who are the US and EU representing to tell other countries how to live their lives??
There is nothing special about Western intervention vs. intervention by other regional powers. Nations with power rarely use it for the well being of the world. But shouldn’t one strive to have governments do what you consider to be right?
This is an incorrect understanding of Korean history. US anti-communist policy played no small part in creating North Korea in the first place.
In the postwar period, US support for the right-wing dictator Syngman Rhee, who murdered tens of thousands of Korean citizens he suspected were his political opponents, empowered and drew popular support to Kim Il-Sung. Sung was further bolstered by the US giving favored status to Japan over Korea, forcing them, for example, to purchase goods and expertise from their brutal, former colonial rulers. With this state of affairs, Sung, a former anti-Japanese resistance fighter, was successful in persuading many that that the US-backed rule of Rhee was just an extension of the pre-War colonial rule, ultimately devolving into the never-ending civil war we have today.
This in no way benefitted the south, but instead has been a nearly 70 year long drag on their economy, as well as their development into a liberal democracy (which really didn’t happen until a popular revolt in the 80s because the continued US to provide financing and support to authoritarian rulers in the south).
Chinese companies have much more freedom when conducting business in America and EU than American and EU companies do in China. It is perfectly acceptable for America and EU to stand-up to China on this point.
>What was the last time Western interventionism brought any good for the world?
You're kidding right? WW2, Korean War, Kosovo. Harder is to prove all the wars that never happened because of American enforced good behaviour (without a strong superpower at the helm, you think there wouldn't be full-scale regional wars all over the globe? What would stop some regional tinpot dictator from invading their neighbour).
And then of course, the growth of democracy itself. Do you think it's a coincidence that America's reign as the most powerful and prosperous nation just so happen to coincide with the global growth of democracies? I mean, when there were two superpowers, a market-based democracy and a communist oligarchy, the world largely divided themselves along those systems of government and economics. Before WW2, even Europe wasn't really the democratic heaven it is now, as many of its constituent nations were either fascist or communist dictatorships.
WWI, WWII, Gulf War (1990), Kosovo (1999)?
https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2014/10/the-us-...
For the Americans who want your government to represent you, you’ve got some work to do. Most Americans I know speak of their government as though it were just some poorly run business that somebody else is responsible for. Get your own house in order before you criticize others peoples’.
Google fights major world powers every day [1, 2].
And Google doesn't have to fight to force the Chinese government to stop censoring their citizens.
Google can simply choose not to partner with repressive regimes in enabling and legitimizing censorship and mass surveillance.
[1] https://transparencyreport.google.com/user-data/overview
[2] https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/technology/google-en...
That's right, if by 'fight' you mean following rules laid out in countries that it operates in. If the rules are completely skewed against them (and other foreign companies) as they are in China, they have no recourse other than to appeal to their government to lobby on their behalf.
Facebook is in a similar position with respect to Russian interference. The narrative pushed by people like Kara Swisher of Recode is that Facebook should have fought a major world power with limitless resources for cyber attacks and because they didn't they are responsible for the damage, instead of demanding to know why the previous and present American administrations allowed an American company and public be harassed by a belligerent foreign power.
>Google can simply choose not to partner with repressive regimes in enabling and legitimizing censorship and mass surveillance.
And you can choose not to buy Chinese-made products and thereby no longer support and legitimize a repressive regime ... but hey, here we are.
Exactly my point. Google can choose not to operate in countries where the rules are too egregiously antithetical to their mission.
> Facebook should have fought a major world power
Facebook is responsible for the damage because Facebook built the tools that enabled bad actors to hack democracies and Facebook profited from it (in the short term).
Google is in a similar position. Should they build the tools that enable systematic repression and profit from it?
Sure, they can claim they're "only following orders" but when has that ever worked out well?
I'm all about fairness. Right now, Chinese companies have way more freedom in how they operate in West, than Western companies have in China. All I argued is that is fair for Western governments to put pressure and stand-up for fairness.
>Facebook is responsible for the damage because Facebook built the tools that enabled bad actors to hack democracies and Facebook profited from it (in the short term)
Yeah. They really dropped the ball on that one eh .. how could they have not foreseen being targeted by a major world power with limitless military, cyber and espionage resources. Are you nuts? Tech companies building photo-sharing social networks for grandma should not be left to deal with blatant attacks from belligerent world powers. Defense is the primary function of the nation state, not Facebook!
>ure, they can claim they're "only following orders" but when has that ever worked out well?
What are you talking about? What orders?
They don't make the law, neither should they. It's not Google's job to decide how China runs its country. And offering legitimate users legitimate service is neither immoral nor greedy.
The majority of Chinese people would much rather have a limited set of services than no services at all. They already do live with dozens of censored search engines, so one more makes no difference to them. Google isn't making their life any worse, but rather providing them services they didn't have before. How is that "evil"?
What is with this shaming? OP made a cogent, reasoned point. I don't necessarily agree, but it's not 'shameful'.
Buying tooth brushes or power tools from China may not be ideal, but it is no where near as bad as helping the Chinese goverment oppress its people by contributing to limiting their people's access to information. For a dollar.
Next thing you know, Google might do something really bad, like helping the US Army with some AI research. zOMG!
https://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-dont-be-evil/2540...
They're entirely truthful. It's just oddly structured.
China's priority here is totally not to censor them, it is to conduct the "handshaking ritual" and have them becoming subject under China's "law." A "blood pack" - making them partners in crime.
The same was with Yahoo. They came to China talking only about "search," but got asked about "personal data of all China's opposition members residing in US." Not only they gave everything to China, but put extreme effort to cover their "special relationship" with China's ministry of interior.
In this light, please take a look at very, very close relationship Google tried to establish with Russian government in period of 2005-2010. We are talking about nothing less than first person accounts of people involved certifying that Google was sending all kinds of "consultants" to Russian political establishment, training them in online campaigning. Simultaneously, pages of Russian political opposition did disappear in Google's search. In light of recent events, this should be subject to much scrutiny.
P.S. : Additional comment on Google. At some moment they snapped after all. They closed their Russian development centre, and evacuated key personnel to Switzerland in unprecedented visa deal with government of Zurich.
P.P.S. : On person whom Sundar Pichay was meeting. I read name Wang Huning in the article, and instantly I felt that something "clicked." The name was familiar. Wang Huning is the man who is the real propaganda chief in the communist party. To know more of his view of USA, please read his work titled "America against America." I will not be surprised at all if he is the man entrusted with running their stratagems targeting USA.
this is potentially the corruption story of the century
There was a minor intern in Russian presidential administration. Nicknamed "rLode" in the Internets. I happened to knew him as I attended language courses ran by high school he was attending.
He held his home page there "http://rlode.narod.ru/main.html" a man of unconcealed, borderline rabid views on social class. If you ever unearth an archived version of the page, I guarantee you will have some fun time reading it. If you dig further, finding his offline contacts are not hard.
Second was a Far Eastern strongman nicknamed "Twix" or "Nuts," man running arms trade in the Far East. How he came upon the info, I didn't know. Just assume that being a "big man" in Russia involves having lots of ears. I think you still can find him making appearances online on Russian .onion arms sales sites under different Japanese cartoons themed pseudonyms.
As for people of Google's side, ask any man relocated from Moscow to Zurich. Few people I knew there voiced their extreme surprise with their relocation coming unannounced, and being done with near military level of coordination. Officials were an everyday sight in their office on Balchug street. Just the fact that their office was on an island just a river across from Kremlin tells a lot. Nobody pays a ennormous premium to have office in this special place without having "being close to Kremlin" factor in mind.
On Wang, I once read the very few English translation of 半月谈 with some excerpts from his works. I never read the complete book. But the general theme is him telling party members to not to fear the USA as it is a frustrated, insecure, diseased society - something that has not to be feared, but taken advantage of. His main discontent with USA is it spreading that "plague" around the world. Following, it is CCPs role as "a global messiah" (oh my....) to rectify that, showing world "a different vision of a successful state system."
Okay, so if the US and EU governments would announce tomorrow that they will start a trade war with China and stop US/EU companies from trading with China unless China immediately stops all censorship/human rights abuses, would Google/other tech companies go along with that, or will they lobby against that move?
The tech companies are not as innocent or blameless as you portray them to be.
- American companies stop facilitating totalitarian regimes
- World governments also prompt totalitarian regimes to move towards democracy
I know what you're saying - there's a lot of instability in the world and sometimes people make very poor choices - but democracy is a way to better handle the turbulence.
In essence, it gives us the ability to handle the coup that occurs every few years in unstable environments with less bloodshed - rather than the military taking control and ousting a leader, and a bunch of people dying or being imprisoned, another party takes over at the ballot box.
The newly elected ruler might be a really bad choice, but it's the people's perjorative to choose their leaders and it's a much better alternative than another coup.
By definition, “companies” are incentivized to prioritize capital pursuit over moral pursuit. It’s actually the most fundamental part of the whole concept.
Many democratic governments in the world, and particularly the most wealthy and powerful ones, are run by people who are (to a large unmeasurable extent) incentivized to do what companies want them to do. This is not a fundamental concept of a democratic government, but as long as the electorate fails to take responsibility for their own government’s behavior, the incentives remain in the company’s favor, which doesn’t make a very good case for democracy.
Democracy is a very slippery concept. America, for example, is well understood to not be a democracy, but it’s people seem to have convinced themselves it is. These kinds of miscalculations are really at the root of “why not”.
Indeed. But if it's most reasonable economically, for a company to pay someone to dump their taxic waste into the sea, that doesn't mean it is morally OK to do so.
> Many democratic governments in the world, and particularly the most wealthy and powerful ones, are run by people who are (to a large unmeasurable extent) incentivized to do so what companies want them to do.
Yes. Lobbyists exist. They are bad. Lobbyists are bad because the undermine democracy. Democracy is not bad because of lobbyists.
True, but what are you getting at? It has happened and it does happen. The fact that it isn't morally OK doesn't change the facts on the ground. It's like the bicyclist complaining that he had the right of way vs. a car that hits him.
If doing business in the USA is free & good, many outsider businesses will do business there as well. If doing business in China is not all free & good, outsider business won't do business there. How much that hurts foreign businesses vs hurts China is up for debate. But governments individually rule what goes on in their borders, and use those rules both for internal ideological pursuit as well as to attract or detract external interest, as is their role.
"Fairness" of doing business isn't exactly extreme human rights violations or anything. (Other behaviors are, but not this particular point you're making.)
To believe that China does not attempt to influence other countries is naive. China puts a great deal of pressure on other nations with regard to things like recognition of Taiwan or inviting the Dalai Lama to speak. These have occasionally been in the news over the last few years, e.g. China’s retaliatory measures against Norway for Liu Xiabo winning the Nobel Peace Prize, but in fact they go back decades – when Michelangelo Antonioni was showing his documentary film Chung Kuo around in the early 1970s, in European countries where a screening was organized the local Chinese embassy would raise scandal.
And for pressuring airlines not to list Taiwan on their websites for booking.
China has repeatedly lobbied, with some success now, for East African nations to adopt its "Great Firewall" network infrastructure.
It's not about saying "stop censoring the internet or we'll nuke you", it's about saying "if you want to do business with us we demand that you meet these standards, otherwise no biggy, we'll just go elsewhere."
And China does attempt to do the same thing, for instance in many African countries. It's less obvious because they're still ramping up their diplomacy, US and EU have a huge headstart there.
If an American pays a Chinese businessman in China a bribe, that's an FCPA [1] violation. If the U.S. government wanted to prevent American technology companies from helping China's dictator build a modern dystopia, it would have precedent.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_Corrupt_Practices_Act
Israel massacring Palestinians? Hey man, they can do whatever they want, we don't have any right to tell them not to and it doesn't make what they're doing any less wrong!
I don't have the answers but there are hard questions there, not just for our governments but for us as voters.
If you don't want to be banned on HN, you're welcome to email [email protected] and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. Those are at https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
How can we be comfortable with google or any company going to China and effectively saying yup, thats ok.
I don't think that's the parent point, it's more that if you do consider that doing business with the Chinese state is unethical then it makes more sense to push for regulation rather than expect big multinational companies to Do The Right Thing. Right now it seems that we're in a race to the bottom and the Chinese government is making the rules.
How does it make more sense? You can't influence foreign policy of your government and you won't find a party with such specific topics which is also powerful enough to actually accomplish something.
With a company like google you can create a shitstorm that will cost them. You can break a companies reputation with a hand full influencers those days.
PS. a company is not a robot (we'd even expect ethics from them). It consists of humans and we should expect acting ethical from a human. They don't get a license to kill the moment they enter their office.
- Most people care a lot how corporations behave. Many corporations have a very, very bad reputation and it affects their business. E.G: I know more than one person who deleted their facebook.
- Google got its popularity by indicating it was not a standard corporation ("Don't be evil" and acting on it). Google is free to sell that away, but if it does it loses a hard-to-quantify place in our idealistic hearts.
- Maybe you're right, maybe we should hold other tech companies to a higher standard too.
- The US Gov has no effective means to change the structure of China's government. It also cares more about trade and stability than the freedom of China's population.
In USA, they obey the copyright laws (often described as draconian, with major companies getting copyright extensions again and again, e.g. Disney) and allow DMCA to suppress this information.
In Europe, they obey the "right to be forgotten".
Google wants to do business in China; and it does so by obeying Chinese regulations. It obeys the law. End of story.
If you want to change it, lobby the PRC.
The regulations in China are immoral. Obeying immoral laws is also immoral. (If the law says 'gas the [ethnic group]' it is still wrong to do it).
If Google must follow immoral laws to operate in China, they should not operate in China.
I don't have any pull with the PRC but I can boycott Google.
The real world isn't black & white like that. By operating in China, Google isn't making _less_ information available to the average Chinese internet user, since Baidu, Bing etc are already censored anyway. If anything, it will likely be a net win in terms of access to information and user experience as we'd finally see some meaningful competition to Baidu.
If you want to have input in a powerful entity, I really recommend starting a government. If you have an old one layout around, maybe dust if off and use that, but it’ll probably take some work.
I don’t know where you live, but in the US, there’s a bunch of people who are interested in reviving their government entity. They can’t do it alone, though. Here’s the website:
Using a private company to earn an income and then saying "I can't do anything about [bad thing company is doing], companies are by their nature amoral profit chasing beasts" is moral cowardice.
If you work for or with that evil entity, you can do something about it. That it would impact your comfortable lifestyle is not really relevant to the moral calculus.
The only thing that will make things better is many people individually doing the right thing.
Also, I'm sure a number of google employees, and the population in general feel this way. When their engineers have to answer for building the mental handcuffs for China, it may not quite be the bragging right it once was.
there is no different standard. it is unethical to aid totalitarian states in their oppression of their people.
that standard is crystal clear, and google is on the wrong side of it.
waffling regarding corporate responsibility is irrelevant because the question of whether the actor is a corporation or not has nothing to do with the standard itself. once again: the moral issue is very clear on what is acceptable and what is not acceptable.
selling widgets to the chinese is not in violation of that standard. offering a product that is neutered so as to be a tool of oppression is in clear violation of the standard.
the question of china using these tools to oppress their population is not up for debate. china is a police state. for ethnic minorities like the uighurs, the falun gong, the chinese muslims, etc, that police state is operationalized to eradicate and prevent any presence in society.
this is not right. it is not right to help the chinese state keep groups of people subjugated and starving.
the apologists should be ashamed. google should be ashamed. google employees should be ashamed, and outraged.
they set that standard for themselves...
Because the purpose and intent of the censorship matters. China's censorship is about suppressing dissent against a human-rights violating authoritarian regime. Western censorship is about suppressing harmful crimes like child abuse and sometimes intellectual property violations. Those goals are not comparable.
Also, China is massively powerful and influential. Many of the countries with similarly strict censorship regimes are so small and weak that they'll never attract the same kind of attention.
This is not true, people care, but not enough to make them stay away from Google. Violating privacy is not that high on most people's mind. If we knew, for example, that Google search engine uses child slave labour, a lot of people would stay away from it. But if it's just remembers what you searched for, most people kinda care, but not enough to inconvenience themselves by using something else. It's not binary, it's a spectrum. And new developments move people's opinions along this spectrum.
Is this because of expectations (i.e. no one expected MS to hold the moral high ground, but Google was famous for its "Do no evil" mantra)? In which case, well, maybe Google's branding backfired in this case :-/
https://techcrunch.com/2018/07/17/apples-icloud-user-data-in...
Presumably even you think there is some line a tech company shouldn't cross, right?
I have absolutely no faith at all that any large company can really stick to some moral compass. Eventually money corrupts all. Any individual morality and sense of responsibility gets diluted to the point where it disappears completely.
I mean, let's take your reasoning to its logical conclusion: I think most would agree that not paying taxes isn't very ethical, does it mean that we shouldn't have any laws and regulations and controlling bodies surrounding these topics because it's a line "a tech company shouldn't cross"?
If you don't put a cop on the line and there's money on the other side I can assure you that it will be crossed. Raising outrage at the company is not an effective way to enforce the law (although it can work at times).
What? No, it means that we shouldn't shrug off bad corporate behavior and say oh well, I guess tax avoidance was good for their quarterly profits.
Raising outrage is an important check on corporate behavior, even moreso in a place like HN, where employers like Google hope to recruit employees.
I'm not saying that you shouldn't be outraged and voice it, I'm saying that for something as large and intricate as our economical and political relashionship with China you can't really expect it to achieve much. The consequences of outrage should be to change laws and regulations to make sure that it never happens again, not Google saying "oh sorry, I won't do it (this time)".
Contrived example, if a printing company wanted to expand into China they would not be allowed print anti Chinese government documents. Would we be as up in arms about this or should there be a law saying that until China increases human rightsn EU/US companies can't work there and Chinese companies can't work/sell to EU/US?
Obviously this won't/can't happen given our dependence on cheap Chinese manufacturing and our need for year on year growth.
Let's say Saudi Arabia approaches Facebook and wants access to profile and location data to help round up all the gay people in the country to be executed. Maybe they even offer to pay a lot of money, so it'll be profitable.
That's fine with you? Those local laws, amirite?
if you marketed yourself in such a way, you shouldn't be surprised if the general public applies different standards to you.
Because Google "is not a conventional company" [1].
A tired trope on HN is that corporations cannot and should not be ethical entities. They are legally mandated to maximize shareholder value, and this usually requires taking actions that people find morally repugnant.
This is a myth and it is horseshit.
Google's mission is to "organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful" [2]. Larry and Sergey knew that realizing its mission requires a long-term focus and a moral center that is unusual for modern corporations.
The public must trust Google to do the right thing even when it's not in Google's short-term interest.
Organic search results skewed by ad payments or censorship is antithetical to Google's mission.
Of course they could make huge short-term profits by compromising the quality and completeness of information, but they've wisely fought against this from the beginning.
This is a rational strategy to maximize the long-term value of the company, and it's worked incredibly well [3].
It would be a crying shame to stop now.
[1] https://abc.xyz/investor/founders-letters/2004/ipo-letter.ht...
Exactly. As for an example of a company showing some backbone...
https://www.macobserver.com/tmo/article/tim-cook-soundly-rej...:
"When we work on making our devices accessible by the blind," he said, "I don't consider the bloody ROI." He said that the same thing about environmental issues, worker safety, and other areas where Apple is a leader.
He didn't stop there, however, as he looked directly at the NCPPR representative and said,
"If you want me to do things only for ROI reasons, you should get out of this stock."
(of course, Apple does do business in China and practices app censorship there, so...)
One would assume it implies offering services to people in China is a goal. Perhaps "do the right thing" is open to interpretation.
> Organic search results skewed by ad payments or censorship is antithetical to Google's mission.
Has Google's policy of blocking images of pedophilia from search results in countries where the laws and morals of the country forbid those images compromised its mission? Or is there room in the mission for the nuance that different people have different common standards?
If what they are doing is legal so be it, what we want to be legal is the real question. Should we be doing business with countries that don't have the same beliefs that we do? The other side is that encouraging companies like google into China could help in the long run.
Could this development be a sign that some of the power of the founders is diminishing within Google and has transferred to e.g. major shareholders?
The majority of people don't really care how corporations behave. If they did Google search/gmail/maps would not be so popular. They have the right price point(0$) for people to ignore any moral misgivings they may have. I'm guilty of this and up to my neck in google services