
Ex-Google engineer describing the company's role in China censorship - seapunk
https://threader.app/thread/1051725524064591872
======
mocae
> 6/ The other thing I find disturbing, after all these years, is the
> willingness of my former colleagues to not only comply with the censorship
> but their enthusiasm in rationalizing it. It is not a coincidence that the
> rationale they give was the same one management had given them

This is the really disgusting thing. Are they "just" sucking up to management
or are they maybe the only ones who buy the propaganda?

Or is this some kind of self-justification process that protects them from
their dying sense of guilt?

~~~
Fricken
I really don't understand what people are upset about. Whether or not Google
rolls out a censored search engine in China has no influence at all whatsoever
in any way shape or form over whether or not the communist party will continue
to enforce censorship. If Google backs out for political reasons, it's not
like the party is going to suddenly see the error of their ways and do an
about face on censorship.

It's just business. Americans has been doing business with China, and the
Chinese people for decades. In spite of the fact that the west and China are
beholden to very different identities, we can still cooperate on things to the
benefit of everyone.

People are 99% the same everywhere, but the 1% that makes us different are
matters of identity, and that's what we gripe about and go to war over. It's
kind of stupid if you ask me, but then again, no one in the history of the
world has ever come up with a reliable solution for human nature.

~~~
ardy42
> I really don't understand what people are upset about. Whether or not Google
> rolls out a censored search engine in China has no influence at all
> whatsoever in any way shape or form over whether or not the communist party
> will continue to enforce censorship.

I'll list out _some_ of the issues:

1\. The view the censorship is immoral. The argument that "we should help them
because we can profit and they'll do it with or without us" has some _very
serious flaws_ that can be easily shown by a few thought experiments.

For instance: your colleague is going to rob a bank and there's nothing you
can do to stop him, is it right for you to volunteer to drive the getaway car
since he'll pay you handsomely if you do? If you don't drive, someone else
will, and you'll be leaving money on the table.

> It's just business. Americans has been doing business with China, and the
> Chinese people for decades. In spite of the fact that the west and China are
> beholden to very different identities, we can still cooperate on things to
> the benefit of everyone.

2\. Doing business with China gives the Communist Party leverage to influence
corporate operations elsewhere for ideological reasons. They've shown
increasing willingness to use that influence to push their political views
(for a recent example, see the recent situation with how foreign airlines
represent Taiwan on their foreign-language websites).

Imagine, ten years from now, Google because popular and profitable in mainland
China. The Communist Party wants to manage Western perceptions of an issue
(say Tibet) and gives Google an ultimatum: derank all pro-Tibet independence
websites from the top 20 results of certain Tibet-related searches, or they'll
shutdown their Chinese operations. What choice do you think the shareholder-
value maximizing corporation is going to make?

This article tackles the topic from a different angle:
[https://foreignpolicy.com/2018/10/11/if-the-u-s-doesnt-
contr...](https://foreignpolicy.com/2018/10/11/if-the-u-s-doesnt-control-
corporate-power-china-will/)

~~~
Fricken
It's funny, we get upset that China censors the free and open exchange of
ideas until the subject of intellectual property comes up, and then we get
upset because China doesn't respect the fact that we like to keep ideas under
lock and key. Once you get under all the bullshit it's as simple as America
believing that it should win and China should lose. The problem is, that by
merit of demographics, and China's stable political and economic system,
they're on track to become the dominant and economic power in the world, and
there's not a lot you can do about it.

You can worry that China could have too much leverage over Google if they
become dependent on profits earned in China. It's corroborated in the article
you provided:

>a deeply conservative Pence sounded like liberal stalwart Sen. Elizabeth
Warren in arguing the Chinese are using America’s own short-term-oriented
financial system against it.

Our shareholder value short-term oriented financial system is a problem in our
own backyard, something we can do something about rather than fearmongering
against China. It remains a strict hypothetical that that Google would kowtow
to China's demands and censor it's domestic search engine. I don't think
they'll do that, but even if they did, we can cross that bridge when we get to
it, until then it's just a hypothetical worst case scenario. If Google has a
dangerous amount of control over the flow of information, that's because it's
the service that most Americans choose to use, which is kind of the shitty
thing about a free and open society. In China if they decide something is a
net negative, they can stop it.

------
mikejb
> 13/ I encourage employees of Google who have been asked to work on censored
> products to stand up against these requests, as I did in 2006, and make it
> known that Google's willingness to censor is immoral.

I'd rather formulate it this way:

 _I encourage employees of Google who have been asked to work on censored
products to take a look from different perspectives, apply their values and
morale, make an informed decision on whether they want to support what they
're asked to work on - and have the spine to follow through with their
decision._

The reason why I disagree with the original statement is that it feels like
people are forcing their own moral decisions on others. "I'm convinced it's
bad, so you have to agree and act like it".

~~~
pimmen
I would try to simplify it like this: "would you be able to look the people
China will suppress with your technology in the eye and tell them 'I built the
tools China use'?"

edit: reformulated it to something less loaded

~~~
mikejb
That's pretty loaded. Try to reformulate it with less of your own bias.

------
Yetanfou
It is an odd thing that a company can on the one hand become known as the one
firing an engineer who tried to open an honest discussion on a hot subject
like 'gender discrimination' because that engineer was deemed to lack a moral
compass, while on the other hand bending over backwards to assist an
oppressive - but lucrative - dictatorship in implementing a real-life version
of Oceania's Ingsoc [1] [2]. As if these people are so blind-sided by their
own ideology that they do not recognise their own moral compasses twirling as
if they're in the Bermuda triangle and the 'no' being struck from their
previous motto of 'do no evil'.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ingsoc](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ingsoc)

[2] [https://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-09-18/china-social-
credit-a...](https://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-09-18/china-social-credit-a-
model-citizen-in-a-digital-dictatorship/10200278)

~~~
topmonk
It's not about a moral compass, it's about attracting top talent. The
universities push this ideology, so if you want to get the alumni from the
universities to work for you, you have to abide by the tenets.

~~~
nradov
Except that the notion of "top talent" appears to be a myth.

[https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2002/07/22/the-talent-
myt...](https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2002/07/22/the-talent-myth)

~~~
vertline3
Interesting link, I just skimmed it but I don't think it quite showed top
talent is a myth, but rather that our ways of measuring that talent is flawed,
this syncs up with ideas from Moneyball as well. We know that pitching is a
talent, but we struggle to project who will be the future star due to our
preconcieved biases.

So in the story they found a stronger correlation between tacit knowledge than
simply IQ for instance.

------
lvoudour
_9 / For many people there is little difference between what is legal and what
is moral. This mindset is especially dangerous when it is held by people in
power, such as Google's executives. The mindset is: if it's a legal
requirement to censor, then we should do it. _

Except when standing on a moral pedestal does not hurt your bottom line. Then
apparently it's ok to dictate what is moral and what is not, what is good and
what is evil and use your power to force your agenda. It's not google's (or
any company's) version of morality that gets me, it's always the hypocrisy

~~~
seanmcdirmid
The free market does have a tendency of weeding out those companies that act
morally beyond legality, because less moral competitors can outcompete them.
So as a survival bias, less moral companies are just more likely to be left
standing. Likewise, morality beyond legality is much more likely if it doesn’t
yield any ground to competitors (ie effect the bottom line), so what you see
as hypocrisy might again just be survival bias in a free market.

~~~
humanrebar
Don't know why you single out free markets there. A lack of scruples can be
advantageous in economically closed environments as well.

~~~
seanmcdirmid
Survival bias applies to a lot of situations. For example, in a system where
corruption is endemic, non-corrupt officials won’t get promoted (because they
have no dirt higher ups can use against them and/or don’t bribe the right
people), leaving only corrupt officials. Do non-corrupt officials exist? Yes,
but they are not likely to survive to he noticed.

------
flamedoge
Honest question: Should a company like google take the lesser evil route and
still provide neutered service simply because target audience is huge? Google
could still bring a lot of good to the people. Sure it doesn't exactly
subscribe to the Western ideals, but is distancing from China throwing baby
out with the bathwater?

~~~
ArchD
It's not simply about the first-order effects. Making a large investment in
the Chinese market controlled by the CPC means putting up great value at risk
that the CPC can leverage to assert influence. Evil influence spreads into the
company and it becomes even more evil.

Considering the history of their actions against even their own people, and
the words they say, 'evil' is not an understatement.

Yes, other states are also evil, but their evil is deeper and more
fundamental. For example, they actively censor the history of their own
misdeeds, including massacre of their own people from a few decades ago in
1989, and because of the strong censorship, who knows what else they are doing
nowadays that's hidden?

A concrete example of what may happen is that after making a huge investment
in China, Google gets a request to do more than just censor, an offer it
cannot refuse. It is asked to spread malware to dissidents, or extend the
censorship to other countries like Taiwan, or something nefarious like that.
If it refuses, it'll be kicked out of China for some bullshit reason. Getting
kicked out means incurring a big loss because of the huge investment. What
will it do then? If it can't say 'no' now, it will not be able to say 'no'
then. This country does not have "rule of law", but it has "rule by law".
There is no independent judiciary. The state can say F U and there's nothing
you can do about it.

~~~
oconnor663
> A concrete example of what may happen is that after making a huge investment
> in China, Google gets a request to do more than just censor, an offer it
> cannot refuse.

It's possible that the opposite could happen too. China's leverage over Google
is that they can pull the plug on google.com, but I don't know (correct me) if
there are a lot of employees that they can throw in jail. So if Google builds
up a lot of brand capital over 5 or 10 years, and pulling the plug becomes an
unpopular move for the government, it could be that Google ends up with some
leverage of its own about what to do with search results.

This isn't my area, so I'm just making all this up, but I notice that the tone
of the thread is "something something I thought they said don't be evil," and
I'm imagining that the reality is more complicated.

------
dandare
I don't get Google. The cost of switching to competitor's products are near-
zero, Google's public image is its most valuable asset. Is the Chinese search
market - and other evil products - really worth the risk?

I have switched to DDGG 3 weeks ago and I am seriously testing Firefox.

~~~
JeremyBanks
The cost of switching from Google was low when Search was their only product.
They have their hooks a lot deeeper in users these days. Android, Gmail, Docs,
and others are harder to switch away from.

~~~
yborg
It's more pervasive than that, they have hooks in the entire contemporary
Internet ecosystem (DoubleClick, Google Analytics, etc.) So they don't care if
you never touch a Google-branded site, they can collect and sell data on you.
And Mozilla is largely funded by Google.

------
thecatspaw
why do people write whole blogposts on twitter?

~~~
Brotkrumen
You go where your customers are, or audience iin this case

~~~
pdkl95
Reaching a large audience can be useful, but it might not be worth the cost of
using an established medium. From the forward - which was probably written by
Marshall McLuhan - to Edmund Snow Carpenter's book "They became what they
beheld":

> If you address yourself to an audience, you accept at the outset the basic
> premises that unite the audience. You put on the audience, repeating cliches
> familiar to it.

> Utilizing existing channels can wipe out a statement. There is a widely
> accepted misconception that media merely serve as neutral packages for the
> dissemination of raw facts. Photographers once thought that by getting their
> photographs published in _Life_ , they wo9uld thereby reach large audiences.
> Gradually they discovered that the only message that came through was _Life_
> magazine itself and that their pictures had become but bits & pieces of that
> message. Unwittingly they contributed to a message far removed from the one
> they intended.

Twitter may actually be a useful tool for reaching large audiences for _some_
messages, but "the medium is the message" and using Twitter as your medium
clearly involves diluting your message with the "Twitter style".

------
majia
There are many Google mirror sites, most of which are blocked in China. If the
Chinese government decides to work with some of the mirror sites to deliver
Google search results in China, on the condition that the mirror sites must
censor the search results, what would happen? I could think of three reactions
from Google:

1\. Block those mirror sites from accessing Google search results, but this
may be technically difficult.

2\. Do nothing. Effectively a censored Google becomes available in China but
people can hardly blame google for not blocking the mirror sites.

3\. Work with the mirror sites (e.g. require them to display Google ads). This
is pretty much dragonfly.

It seems that Dragonfly doesn't really change anything about China's
censorship after all?

~~~
aembleton
4\. Feed the mirror sites mis-leading information that causes them to be less
effective than Baidu and/or works past their filter and informs Chinese users.

~~~
majia
How? Google may accidentally feed misleading information to some real users,
and this may cause a huge backfire like what happened to FB.

------
lovemenot
If Dragonfly should be launched yet fail to fly, whether for political or for
business reasons, Google may perhaps fall back on Sergey Brin.

Just as Twitter has cycled through its founders as CEO, after their serious
mis-steps and failed initiatives.

------
jancsika
> As I previously tweeted, Sergey Brin is a notable exception to this
> temptation, and he is reported to be the reason that Google left China in
> 2010

Dear digital spin doctors of HN,

What are the likely online tactics that will be used to neutralize Brin's on-
the-record statements and previous action regarding China?

It must be a drag to practice those dark arts of digital public manipulation
in secret all the time. So c'mon, make some public predictions with a
throwaway and let us follow along at home!

Edit: wording

------
baybal2
On the other note: Google's new 'research centre' in Beijing looks to be much
more than it should be, much more like a smallish campus.

------
mikejb
The person posting this left Google in 2007 [1]. The screenshot indicates the
emails took place in February 2016 and October 2018 [2]. The conversation
seems focused around events before 2008 (e.g. the selection of holding the
Olympic games in Beijing). (Other people pointed it out as well [3]).

Were the dates in the emails faked? What's going on?

[1]
[https://www.linkedin.com/in/vijayboyapati](https://www.linkedin.com/in/vijayboyapati)

[2]
[https://twitter.com/real_vijay/status/1051725529512964096](https://twitter.com/real_vijay/status/1051725529512964096)

[3]
[https://twitter.com/wiretapped/status/1051739819121016832](https://twitter.com/wiretapped/status/1051739819121016832)

------
agumonkey
Time to flood this
[https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=google%20tell%20me%20h...](https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=google%20tell%20me%20how%20to%20stop%20using%20google)

------
est
> because in the digital era, the suppression of information acessibilty is
> incompatible with free-market productivity

LOL. This video is not available in your country.

China is just a giant corp intranet with a huge ass firewall.

------
iamleppert
Google is a creatively and morally bankrupt company. The original spark is
long gone and it’s just another soul-less big company now.

------
JustSomeNobody
What happens to Google in 10 years if they don't move into the China market?
Can Google survive without moving into China? Will some upstart move in there
and dominate the market? Will the stock market punish Google for not moving
into China?

Why is it OK to have all our devices, etc. manufactured in China, but it's not
OK for Google to offer services there?

~~~
undreren
> Why is it OK to have all our devices, etc. manufactured in China, but it's
> not OK for Google to offer services there?

This is a great angle. I have no idea, why there is such a huge disparity
there, but I have three possible explanations:

1\. People do not understand supply chain management (myself included). There
is nothing inherently evil about employing people in a foreign country, and
not many people are aware that cost of production is lower in China because of
(sometimes) horrible working conditions.

2\. Google branded itself on "Don't be evil". More or less everyone in western
countries would agree that facilitating censorship on a massive scale for the
benefit of government officials is "bad".

3\. Hypocrisy. Our way of life depends on low wage labour (read: explotiation
of the poor) in foreign countries. Our morals follow our wallet.

~~~
eeZah7Ux
4\. Global consumerism is built on global labor arbitrage (read: exploitation
of the poor). People are somewhat aware it but politicians only care about
large companies making big profits.

~~~
undreren
How is this the fault of government?

~~~
eeZah7Ux
Of out 5 countries described as "communist", the US government flattened N.
Korea, invaded Vietnam, embargoed Cuba and developed China into one of the
biggest world economies and a techno-dictatorship.

Clearly the US government has the power to decide the destiny of less powerful
countries.

Compared to that, setting up trade agreements with China to ensure human
rights, worker safety, environment protection and so on is pretty doable.

------
qubax
So china wanted google news and google search censored. Honestly, what's the
big deal?

Google news and google search is also censored in the US, Europe, Middle East
and everywhere.

Why is it that so many vocal ex-employees are against censorship in china, but
demand censorship in the US?

I'm against censorship everywhere but the self-righteousness of these people
when it comes to china is getting to be unbearable.

These ex-employees are saying google has to censor news and search because the
internet is "too toxic" and causing too much division. This is precisely what
the chinese authorities say to justify censorship.

And with the recent revelations of how politically driven and manipulative
google is ( and has been ), I highly doubt the chinese or any country would
allow google in without certain restrictions.

~~~
humanrebar
China is doing something different entirely here. Denying facts to keep the
population under control, for instance. That is different entirely from what
the typical Western country censors: advertising illegal drugs, child porn,
hate speech, etc.

[https://www.businessinsider.com/words-china-banned-from-
sear...](https://www.businessinsider.com/words-china-banned-from-search-
engines-after-tiananmen-square-2014-6)

~~~
qubax
> Denying facts to keep the population under control, for instance.

This is different from us how?

> That is different entirely from what the typical Western country censors:
> advertising illegal drugs, child porn, hate speech, etc.

China also censors illegal drugs, child porn, "hate speech", etc.

You are right. China censors for the good of their own citizens and our
censors do so for the good of us. Oh wait, that sounds exactly the same.

I love people who conflate "hate speech" with child porn and illegal drugs. Is
physics "hate speech" to flat earthers? Should we censor physics? What's next?
Hate thought? Should we monitor people's brain for hate thought. Science
itself is hate speech to religious people. Should we censor science?

There are lots of facts that people on both sides consider "hate speech". For
example, I consider your support of censorship hate speech. Should you be
censored?

Just as I said, these people love censorship in the US but hate censorship in
china. Makes me wonder who and what is pushing and funding such anti-liberal
and anti-western "hate speech" in the US. In all my time on the internet, I
haven't come across such openly fascistic and anti-liberal "hate speech" until
fairly recently.

~~~
lucozade
> Is physics "hate speech"

If it's somehow an incitement to an immediate illegal action then it may be.
Otherwise it's not.

In the US, hate speech isn't like being offended, it's not in the eye of the
beholder. It's been covered a number of times by the Supreme Court.

And China is quite different from the US wrt free speech. US courts take a
very dim view of restrictions to political free speech. It's quite a stretch
to say the same about China. In fact, I'd argue that there are plenty of
Western democracies who are less lenient in that regard than the US.

~~~
qubax
> If it's somehow an incitement to an immediate illegal action then it may be.
> Otherwise it's not.

So it's not.

> In the US, hate speech isn't like being offended, it's not in the eye of the
> beholder. It's been covered a number of times by the Supreme Court.

I know. The point is that these people want hate speech to be illegal like it
is in many other western nations. They want more censorship for the US, less
in china.

------
lewisflude
Aside: I found the final sentence of the article (injected by Threader)
interesting. "Enjoy Threader? Tell @jack."

I wonder if Twitter will eventually branch out into more long form content
like this.

------
comesee
Google is clearly evil now. Will anyone do anything about it?

~~~
Cthulhu_
Like what? Will anyone do anything about China? How about the US?

"Will anyone do anything about it" is classic bystander effect by the way -
what are you doing about it?

~~~
Doctor_Fegg
To be fair, HN is probably the biggest single forum of people building
alternatives to Google products (aside from internal MS/Apple etc. forums, one
presumes).

------
cromwellian
The real risk of Google entering China, and possibly succeeding, is the a
reverse-effect happening with regard to censorship globally. The theory is, by
Google operating in China, it will help liberalize and open things up, that
may have worked in the Deng Xiaoping era when, but after the hardliners took
power, and especially with Xi, things are going in the opposite direction of
the "End of History" folks predictions. Economic well being did not bring an
appetite for Democracy, it brought an appetite for not "rocking the
boat"/"don't mess with a good thing"

By reverse-effect, I mean, let's say Google is hugely successful in China. It
proves a censored search engine works and is good business, first of all. So
economic arguments about the harm will be delegitimatized. Other states will
ask for more censorship, and Google can't reply 'this is too costly or harmful
to our business' because China would be an example of how to make it work. So
the end result might be that Saudi Arabia, and Turkey, and Indonesia, Brazil,
Zimbabwe, etc will all of a sudden be asking for their own forks of Dragonfly.
(I just picked those countries at random, with no specific example of
censorship in mind)

Secondly, if they become hugely successful in China, it compromises them just
like Apple. The revenue stream will become a golden goose and too valuable to
risk the anger of the government. So you'll have Google executives having to
embarrass themselves like Tim Cook by praising China's "open" internet
([https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2017/12/04...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2017/12/04/apple-
ceo-backs-chinas-vision-of-an-open-internet-as-censorship-reaches-new-
heights/?utm_term=.5cabb9e90812))

Third, Google made one of the few brave moral decisions leaving China. Perhaps
you don't believe Brin did it for the reasons claimed, but your belief isn't
important, what is important is what many people believe this, especially
politically repressed people who need to believe in heroic actions. This
undercuts that decision. If the world's most popular company for organizing
information not only fails to fight censorship, but actively helps regimes
that wants to implement state level censorship, it will be a big loss of a
beacon in the constant struggle between censorship and anti-censorship forces.
Having the world's largest companies, even if they're only doing it for
economic reasons, on the side of anti-censorship is better than having the
world's largest companies on the side of censorship (for economic reasons)

And fourth, Google can't change China. The idea that a SV tech company can
trigger improvements in the politics and openness of a powerful country like
China is quite simply hubris. We're not smart enough to do this, and
intelligence isn't even the factor. China's future will be written by its
people and internal events.

If they want an uncensored search engine, then one day, the political winds
will change, and they will demand it. But until they do so powerfully enough
for the current government to change its behavior, the actions of foreign
firms won't do anything. I'm not sure we should involve ourselves in this
fight other than through NGOs that already fight these things (e.g. Amnesty
International) or offering anti-firewall/anti-censorship tools.

There's only one argument for doing business in China as a search engine, and
it is a legitimate one, just not a moral one: the shareholder argument.

------
mirap
Do we have any valuable resources like this, but from 2018?

------
titzer
The only morality of the global economy is growth.

------
mwj
Not sure about the conditions of employment with Google, but if he has
archives of emails long after he's left the company, could a lawsuit be
forthcoming?

------
stef25
Is authoritarianism in China getting better or worse? If it's getting better
than what it used to be under actual communist rule then perhaps there's still
some hope for economic prosperity bringing democracy to China.

~~~
sverige
It's still actual communist rule -- by the Communist Party of China, no less.

~~~
int_19h
It's rule by people who use the brand "communist", but they aren't actually
communists in any meaningful sense, not even as in what the word meant to the
Soviets. China is very authoritarian, but it is not communist or even
socialist. Fascism would be an accurate description, though, as Mussolini
himself defined it ("Everything within the state, nothing outside the state,
nothing against the state.")

~~~
sverige
> It's rule by people who use the brand "communist", but they aren't actually
> communists in any meaningful sense, not even as in what the word meant to
> the Soviets. China is very authoritarian, but it is not communist or even
> socialist.

What does this even mean? The government and the people who run it are the
direct political descendants of Mao and the Communists who overthrew the
Chinese government in the '40s. They are Communists. Full stop. If the people
who call themselves "Communist" and have run the most populous nation in the
world for the last 75 years can't be the very definition of "communist," then
words have no meaning.

~~~
gyaru
>If the people who call themselves "Communist"

North Korea confirmed to be a democracy?

~~~
sverige
Clearly not. They are ruled by the Workers' Party of Korea, and it is a self-
described revolutionary and socialist state.

And since we were originally talking about Chinese communists, it's
interesting to note that they have been the chief supporters of North Korea's
government.

------
baybal2
... on the other note: Madurai - a city where Sundar was born, is known to be
a communist enclave in otherwise nationalist dominated state of Tamil Nadu.

 _Check out his father 's background and 'the labour activism'..._

------
thelastidiot
Google was doing no evil till Sundar Pichai happened.

------
ElBarto
This is the real world.

Google and the US are better off being present in China that being left out.

~~~
trendia
Why?

~~~
myself248
Thought experiment: If Google doesn't move in, someone else will eventually
fill the vacuum. Who?

Suppose that Chinese-born-and-bred search-engine-and-advertising-company,
through virtue of having access to a massive economic resource, succeeds
broadly and then enters the western markets. What then?

Not trying to justify any of this, but it's worth discussing.

~~~
int_19h
> If Google doesn't move in, someone else will eventually fill the vacuum.
> Who?

Someone with less skills and expertise, who will hopefully make more mistakes
implementing censorship? Or maybe someone with more skin in the game (e.g.
locals) who might actually be more motivated to sabotage it?

But, conversely, Google implementing such a thing in China - and justifying it
as moral there by these arguments - would also give them skills and expertise
to do it US in the future, and a canned excuse as to why it's okay.

> Suppose that Chinese-born-and-bred search-engine-and-advertising-company,
> through virtue of having access to a massive economic resource, succeeds
> broadly and then enters the western markets. What then?

Then we engage in protectionism ourselves.

------
lallysingh
The CEO is not a founder. He's beholden to the shareholders without any
leverage for pushback.

~~~
simion314
I am not familiar how this things work, is there some kind of a vote where
shareholders debate if this(censorship) is a good idea or not? Or there are
only a few people that can decide it.

~~~
sleepychu
It's implicit, the CEO must deliver value to the shareholders or be replaced.
Capitalism doesn't leave a lot of room for moral standing.

~~~
tikkabhuna
Large shareholders have corporate values (ethical, etc) that they will push
onto companies they own shares in.

Blackrock[1] has said social responsibility is important to them.

Companies looking for investment need to operate with principles aligned with
investors or investors will look for alternatives.

[1] - [https://www.cnbc.com/2018/01/23/blackrocks-push-for-
social-r...](https://www.cnbc.com/2018/01/23/blackrocks-push-for-social-
responsibility-shows-shift-in-companies.html)

------
tinkerteller
I get the hoopla but what’s the alternative? It’s not that Chinese customers
are clamoring for any of the Google services. Without Google, China will
continue to develop their home grown services with far more surveillance than
Google would put in. There are zero nations in the world which will stand up
against China and dare to ask them do things differently. Some scholars even
believe that Chinese culture is predisposed to this kind of government and
westerners are simply not “getting it”. I personally don’t get either
Britain’s tendencies to put person in charge of declaring wars and face on
their currency because of no other reason than that person being born in
certain family.

