Re:I’m Chinese, Google’s DragonFly Must Go On
by jhanschoo on Saturday December 01, 2018 @02:25AM
(#18575739)
Nevertheless, as OP mentioned, the decision concerns Chinese citizens, and it is always useful to obtain input from stakeholders.
Re:I’m Chinese, Google’s DragonFly Must Go On
by pas on Saturday December 01, 2018 @04:09AM
(#18575995)
I don't think they care much. Baidu works, and if they are dissatisfied there is Bing. Yet Baidu is the market leader there. Why would they switch to Google?
Re:I’m Chinese, Google’s DragonFly Must Go On
by cben on Tuesday December 04, 2018 @06:19AM
(#18598371)
Why did I care when I discovered Infoseek, Excite, Open Directory Project, Dogpile (I'm fuzzy on the exact order) and eventually Google?
Do you remember your feeling when playing with a new search engine?
Differences in access to information are real and quickly felt.
(disclaimer: ex-googler. In words Google itself likes to use, because long-tail search matters. Also I should mention I now default to DuckDuckGo, on privacy grounds, but it's not a step up just "surprisingly not bad", I frequently repeat a search in Google and get more results)
Re:I’m Chinese, Google’s DragonFly Must Go On
by SuperSandro2000 on Monday December 03, 2018 @06:54AM
(#18588067)
Thats the point! We in the west want to keep our freedom. If Google would censor there search for china every other dictatorship in the world would want there own censored one. Maybe Germany wants swastikas and Hitler censored. China should become more liberal but this won't happen because then the Chinese leadership will fall and a revolution would happen and together with that North Korea would fall and leave Russia as the last communist country.
This is not the concern in the signed letter. It is also not related to any of the core concerns from commenters here, as far as I can tell.
Yet somehow, many people are feeding the idea that the primary question is a cost-benefit analysis from the perspective of a person living in China. Of course, access to a pseudo-Google in China would be better for people there. It would be another option, and probably a tad closer to uncensored.
The concerns are simply not about that.
This is about setting a precedent of a company in a liberal democracy bending to the wishes of the government of a non-liberal-democracy.
The concern is that this compromise is not only something that happens in China, but also something that happens next in UK and then in Germany, and then in the US.
The concern is that any society with an "unfiltered" Google becomes a thing of the past. The concern is that the largest organization in the world controlling access to information begins "partnering" with governments and we step into an accelerated path towards disinformation.