We are Google employees – Google must drop Dragonfly

Re:We are Google employees – Google must drop Dragonfly by tivert on Tuesday November 27, 2018 @11:00AM (#18543393)

> Not sure if this will benefit people over there though to ban google completely.

It won't really help them, and focusing on the Chinese market misses the most insidious problem: a censored Google search engine in the PRC gives the Chinese Communist Party leverage over Google outside of the PRC. Just look at what happened with the airlines: the PRC forced them to change their foreign websites to reflect a PRC political positions by threatening their access to their market.

Think of what they could do to "uncensored" American Google with similar leverage:

* Chinese human rights websites are deranked from relevant searches down to the second or third page. This is a subtle and deniable type of censorship.

* Ditto with critical coverage of Tibet or Xinjiang.

* Taiwan is shown on Google maps and infoboxes as part of the PRC.

* Google gives Xinhua, the PRC's English-language propaganda outlet [1], prominence on Google news.

* etc.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xinhua_News_Agency#Bias_&_poli...

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Re:We are Google employees – Google must drop Dragonfly by gfo on Tuesday November 27, 2018 @12:06PM (#18544116)

You assume they don't already have leverage in Google. I would be more surprised if the Chinese haven't already found ways to leverage Google for external influence (akin to Russia, Iran, etc. via Facebook).

But I agree with the core point - the 'legal' influence would bother me just as much.

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