Yes, me. It's the single factual act of Google's history that sticks in my mind. It says to me someone near the top will lose revenue to make an ethical stand. I can't remember too many other concrete examples of this in large companies.

Google abandoned China because the Chinese government was hacking and stealing its technology, rerouting its traffic to homegrown and government-subsidized competitors like Baidu, and generally making the value of the market not worth the hassle. Google wanted to do business in China, but basically it couldn't. The government's demands to censor and monitor search results were just icing on a tall, thick cake.

To whatever extent Google based its decision to cede the Chinese market on ethical principles, that's wonderful and to be commended. But ethics probably had 10% to do with it. Principal always drives principle.

In the same vein, can the moral gains for Bloomberg from running these two stories outweigh the monetary/reporting freedom losses that will come too?

Maybe someone can get away with not doing the right thing once or twice and still be viewed as an overall ethical person, but just because they do the right thing once or twice does not earn them that honor.

The company has been trying on and on again to get into China somehow, Sandberg has been on the record saying "China's the big one" (she talked a lot about it in the Charlie Rose interview from some time back), Zuck himself I think was scheduled to give China another visit but those plans were presumably scrapped in the post-NSA-leaks environment.

Now more than ever, it is clear that no American social networking media company will ever have substantial market share in China. The Chinese government will never let it fly, it's as simple as that.

A free market in Internet companies in China is not possible until regime change in China. I think a change in government in China to a post-communist system is moderately possible, although various geopolitical trade-offs have caused this to take longer in China than it did in most parts of eastern Europe. The bubble economy in China makes it likely that there will be internal pressure there for regime change when the bubble pops.

Transitions in other Asian countries from authoritarian (which is what China is right now) to democratic governments typically coincided with the populace reaching a certain level of wealth and education.

I don't see that level being reached in China any time soon because the sort of accelerated export-oriented growth that worked in other Asian countries won't work when you have more than a billion people. China is still very far from the levels of wealth and prosperity in Korea or Taiwan when they transitioned to democracy.

I'm pretty sure the main reason is that his wife is ethnically Chinese. For business purposes, a translator is more than sufficient. And from what I remember, he gave this up after a year of private tutoring because he wasn't getting anywhere - you really have to make a big time commitment to learn a language like Chinese.

Wikileaks isn't motivated by making a "profit", other than its immediate needs for survival. As for "leaking", it's already been one of the main sources for "investigative journalism", it's just that in the past it was more of a "push" thing from journalists, to try and get the classified documents, and in the future it will be more of a "pull" thing, where the leaks will come to them, and they just need to figure out what's the story from them.

This is especially important when media entities can't have "boots on the ground" anymore, and they need to be a lot leaner - blog-level leaner. And it's all good as long as they keep their integrity, which ultimately is what really matters about a news agency, no matter how small or big, and we can already see most, if not all, of the media entities have become corrupt already, so it's not like we should put our trust in the big news agencies only anymore.

I expect Greenwald's news agency to be very successful if they have a document leak platform on the site, and promote it very well, and put it front and center on the site, because now everyone knows Greenwald has integrity, so a lot of future whistleblowers will coming to him, because they trust him, just like Snowden did.

The real, government-breaking stories of the future, will be coming from small/lean news agencies that have a very high-level of integrity. However, we, the people, also need to push for much bigger whistleblowing protections, unless we expect every whistleblower from now on to literally throw away their lives for us, which is really quite an unreasonable expectation, even from most potential whistleblowers.

While some companies - most notably Google - do the right thing against their own interests, you are right that this isn't something that can be expected of profit driven corporations in general. That's exactly why governments should act.

But we can all do somthing to make it clear this is unacceptable:

  User-agent: Baiduspider
  Disallow: /

  User-agent: QihooBot
  Disallow: /

I don't think we should make this into a battle between East and West, as the nytimes has framed it here, it is a battle between corporate and state interests and those they govern, over who owns the news, which to a large extent defines the limits of our thought. That happens in every country, and with every sufficiently influential news org.

I'm not in favor of a large scale trade war or boycott. But in this very specific instance, where one company - Google - has been thrown out of China for taking a stand, and another company with global ambitions benefits from it, I think blocking the latter is not disproportionate.

(I'm not in any way affiliated with Google. In fact, Google is one of my main competitors)

Not to mention the past and present of news, in most cases. One reason I enjoy reading the Economist is that they seem to take a peculiar glee in describing the scissoring-out of their articles by the authorities in various places, from China to a US prison.

I am not simply saying this as an observer. I am saying this as someone who is impacted by the choice google made.

We are an Android shop based in US with 20% of revenue coming in from India. I am sure if Google didn't make that choice, 30% of our revenue today would have been from China (which today is less than 1%). We are happy we lost that 30% revenue for better human rights.

It's ironic that the news media has advanced so far in attempting to mold themselves as some sort of aloof and apart institution, some form of abstract art with no holds to the mundane world of everyday lives and things. And yet at the same time they have become such big business that they are plugged into, and often complicit with, so many of the power structures of the world.

The difference between this and Google is that whether or not Google operates in China, the world outside of China is not affected. People everywhere else still get the same search results. But if Bloomberg decides that it's better to report less negatively in English to its audiences in the whole world in order to make a profit from the Chinese market, it's not the Chinese audience, but the outside world that's gonna be hurt.

Yeah, but at some point in their behavior, you kinda have to stop calling them "journalist" salaries.

This is the past of news too.

'I needed money' is a poor excuse for unethical behavior.

The future?

Well, it is. Because if the US Government would have had a firm stance on protecting Freedom of Speech then the cost-analysis for Bloomberg would be - it is not worth pissing off the US Government.