Why would the US House care about Google's business practices in China?

I think Dragonfly is horrible, but why would the House care?

Who else is a company headquartered in the US that is willfully ignoring serious human rights concerns accountable to? This is exactly what government is for. And they certainly cared in 2007 when Yahoo was behaving similarly [0]. Hopefully Google doesn't want to become "moral pygmies".

[0] https://www.mercurynews.com/2007/11/06/lawmaker-scolds-yahoo...

All American companies operating in China, including all telecom companies, Apple, etc. are handing over all Chinese user info to the Chinese government.

As much as I think that's horrible, there are no laws in the US objecting to any of that.

There is a moral difference between providing information requested by government that already exists in the systems, and creating tools to assist in censoring information.

I would feel the same way if Google were to develop an additional surveillance tools in their products, such as e.g. recording all audio calls and/or giving government ability to remotely listen to smartphone's microphone.

edit: grammar

> There is a moral difference between providing information requested by government that already exists in the systems, and creating tools to assist in censoring information.

Morals are personal values, so you should say "there is a moral difference for me between..."

> I would feel the same way if Google were to develop an additional surveillance tools in their products, such as e.g. recording all audio calls and/or giving government ability to remotely listen to smartphone's microphone.

What if the government mandated Google to do so, would you feel the same way?

The Chinese government mandated that Apple handed over all user data to it, and built all the backdoors to give the government access to it (stored by a government-controlled company). Is that different?

That was 11 years ago. All other big tech firms are doing business in China, by China's rules. Google used to be better than that. It's very sad that that's changing, but again it doesn't seem like something that's relevant for the House.

I fully support the US government regulating every US company that is willfully aiding in the violation of human rights for profit.

That's nice. Why bother questioning Google about an unreleased product when they can question any of the other big tech companies that _already_ do this?

There are 12000 children right now in concentration camps in the US.

Who defines who "violates human rights"?

Not really a comment on the topic, but I feel like name pollution is becoming a bigger and bigger deal recently. With Dropbox's Naultilus and DragonflyBSD and Google's Dragonfly, and like a hundred other examples, things can only get more and more confusing. Imagine talking to a Mathematician about a meager function, the word has two senses(common and mathematical). Things cannot improve the way we are heading.

Convening a hearing on a specific subject (silly as it as in this case) then making it an open season for all other grievances is another despicable aspect of these hearings.

We've banned this account, as we've banned many of your accounts before, for pushing propaganda for Google. Most recently https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17974966, and it goes back a long time before that. It's time you stopped abusing HN like this.

I hope it's obvious to everyone that it doesn't matter whether it's Google, $BigTechCo, or anything else being pushed this way. We have nothing against Google, this has nothing to do with what's in the press or making the rounds this week, and I'm sure that the many Googlers here are as put off by this behavior as the rest of HN. Plus they have an additional reason to be angry at you, for tarnishing their reputation.

Given that we spend our days asking HN users not to accuse each other of astroturfing without evidence—because doing that is such internet poison—few things make more steam come out my ears than finding actual evidence of this abuse. You couldn't do anything worse to wreck the cohesion of this community (edit: or put Google's standing in it more at risk—users here really care about this).

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I'm happy to see serious human rights concerns addressed in any and all forums.

I don't see a unique human rights angel here, there are many companies doing business with China and a number of other "iffy" governments, if congress was truly alarmed by that they could sanction these companies.

This thing became about political retribution after google dropped maven.

To be clear, this isn't about doing business in China. It is about responding to 14 human rights organizations having serious concerns [0] about proactive censorship and support for surveillance. And I agree that Google is far from alone in crossing such ethical lines in Silicon Valley.

[0] https://www.hrw.org/news/2018/08/28/open-letter-google-repor...

I'm not talking about Silicon Valley, I'm talking about all other industries in all countries, most Silicon Valley companies are banned in China, stop vilifying Silicon Valley.

I'm sure these organizations are great and are doing wonderful work but they are not government entities and Google has no obligation to respond to them, further more these are non profits, attaching themselves to a high profile subject like Google gives them more exposure and potentially more donations.

I hate to bicker, but, according to Google's own AI Principles [0], they have a self-imposed obligation to respond to serious human rights concerns.

They promised not to pursue "technologies whose purpose contravenes widely accepted principles of [...] human rights".

[0] https://www.blog.google/technology/ai/ai-principles/

It's debatable if the China thing applies, in any case congressional committees need not interfere.

All your comments have at least two things in common.

1. A seemingly willful disreguard for the facts. 2. Another striking commonality that I can't aledge but a trip through your comments will bear out. The topic always seems to be common. The timing of the account creation is of course purely circumstantial. Draw your own conclusions, but to say that you are constructively adding to discussion would be a reach.

"Can't allege" is an oxymoron.

Please don't insinuate astroturfing in comment threads. If you think you're seeing abuse, email us at [email protected] so we can investigate. We ban accounts when we find evidence of abuse (I've banned that one), but just dropping a comment in the thread makes it unlikely that we'll ever see it. It also poisons discussion in the case where the insinuation wrong, which is far more common.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

How come national policy of the host country is only relevant to specifically China, though?

It's one thing to say "I won't censor and that's that", one could argue about which approach does more good/harm for the Chinese citizens affected, but it's an argument.

But the argument I'm seeing go around is a lot more like "fuck China specifically". Which doesn't seem to square with the other views activists generally espouse about foreign countries/cultures.

What exactly would an international corporation like Google gain if they'd start being a tool of American external politics and propaganda? Besides being kicked out of their other markets (EU, India, Russia) Trump considers enemies right now?

Respecting Article 19 of the 1948 UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights [0] and concerns from 14 human rights organizations [1] is not America specific. It is about not secretly sacrificing basic freedoms in exchange for access to markets.

[0] http://ccnmtl.columbia.edu/projects/mmt/udhr/article_19.html [1] https://www.hrw.org/news/2018/08/28/open-letter-google-repor...