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?
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...
[2] https://www.google.com/about/our-company/
[3] https://imgur.com/a/LfuM4eQ