This. A market being large isn't an excuse for bloody hands.
Furthermore, don't let Chinese companies trade on US exchanges if they participate in human rights abuses.
Everyone knows what the Chinese government is doing strategically with leveraging access to their markets in exchange for control and forced tech transfer. Other countries are well within their moral rights to insist upon a quid pro quo... or else do the same to Chinese companies (who are just starting to reach scales where international expansion is as important to them as domestic).
The problem for product companies is that the secondary market still exists, and people's perceptions of a brand can be affected by its secondary market just as well as they can by its primary market.
If Apple isn't in China, that doesn't mean that nobody will be able to sell iPhones in China. That just means that Apple won't be selling iPhones in China. But someone, somewhere will still be importing iPhones into China, and people will buy them, and people will associate the resulting product experience with Apple. Those people will then blog about that experience, putting their perceptions on the world stage, where people in other countries' perceptions of the product can be affected by that conversation.
Which means that, if Apple has no Chinese app-store, then people in America will end up thinking worse of Apple. The American zeitgeist will be touched by Chinese-Americans who read Chinese-language blogs written by people living in China, where the experience of having an iPhone will suck because Apple "doesn't support China."
Apple has shown the willingness to compromise to access the Chinese market, so there's absolutely no reason to believe that they wouldn't or haven't bow to their other demands, including the weakening of their device security.
> If I were Chinese I'd be feeling pretty damn patronized if someone told me they were taking my iPhone away and I should be happy about it.
No. You just have to reform your government or leave your country, then you can have it back. I know that this isn't likely, but putting more pressure on the CCP is exactly what Apple could be doing here.
(Edit: The sibling comment thread already goes into detail on this idea.)
You're right that a clear dividing line is needed here. To be fair to Apple, though, they have given this official statement on the matter:
"As we have stated before, Apple has never worked with any government agency from any country to create a backdoor in any of our products or services. We have also never allowed access to our servers. And we never will. It’s something we feel very strongly about."
It is perhaps notable that Apple is not trying to hide or deny this removal of VPN apps (not that they could really do that effectively). As long as Apple is open about its policies, then we have our clear dividing line (and it would be unreasonable to expect Apple to think of every conceivable future technological/policy question in advance).
Still, this is assuming that we can trust Apple to admit its policies, and moreover to consistently follow them, which even governments seem to have trouble doing. It would be nice to instead have technological ecosystems where end users and citizens didn't have to trust the policies and promises of powerful organisations.
> Apple has never worked with any government agency from any country to create a backdoor in any of our products or services.
Is there any reason for them to not automatically generalize this to "...with any entity from any country"? I'm wondering about a case where a government agency hides behind some other veil and makes Apple insert some backdoor.
Google ended up losing the entire Chinese market to Baidu, who are going to end up being a global competitor, and the general population didn't even care that Google left. Apple learned from this that you could be a big deal in the West, but a nobody in the East.
Google lost nothing. China never had any intention of allowing Google to become dominant in China. That was apparent from day one and comports perfectly with their explicitly stated and demonstrated agenda.
>who are going to end up being a global competitor
They already demonstrated they cannot compete without help from the government. It's an inferior product that can only succeed because the better competitors are banned. Kind of like iPhone default browser.
China was never going to be Google's to win in the first place based on their refusal to censor searches. In 2010 Google had 36% of the search market in China[1], so I imagine that "the general population" did care.
Also I'm pretty that Google isn't a nobody in "The East", The East is much more than just mainland China.
I don't understand what you're saying. The alternative is not doing business in China at all, how would they sell more phones in China by getting out of the Chinese market, vs staying in China and complying with the government's demands? I'm very curious about what your market research indicates, because it sounds like a contradiction.
I think what xbmcuser is saying is that Apple is screwed either way: don't pull the apps and be kicked out of China altogether, or pull the apps and lose a competitive advantage. Not that Apple would lose _more_ this way, simply that they still lose.
Yeah that's what I meant either way Apple is going to loose it stays in China or not. They already stopped weechat Payments etc now they are stopping vpn apps so another reason for people in china not to use Apple. I bet in a few years or so China will make using foreign phones about national pride once that happens all other phone manufacturers including Apple will be sidelined.
They could stop operating in Saudi Arabia to show their support for gay rights. But again, there's money to be made. Much easier to just slam Trump or whoever.
Saudi Arabia isn't demanding they cripple their products, so selling their products in Saudi Arabia isn't ethically fraught. And Apple isn't spending their time slamming Trump. They're a tech company, not a politician.
These days, ANYONE with a platform, of ANY kind -- cable TV show, massive Twitter following, corporate officer of a Fortune 500, et. al., is a politician.
That's what cable TV wants you to think, sure. But even if that's true, all of those people and organizations you mentioned should be resisting getting sucked into political vortices whenever it is remotely possible to do so. It's a sad commentary on the state of the world today, not something to be embraced.
Google was aspirational in China when it left: they weren't making much money there...they hoped to in the future.
Apple is not aspirational in China today: they are already making a lot of money there. Leaving China would cause an immediate shock to its stock price as well as a huge cut in actual profits.
> Google was aspirational in China when it left: they weren't making much money there...they hoped to in the future.
I was an engineer on Google's web search indexing system for 4 years (including the Aurora attack), leaving shortly before Google's China exit. I listened to several talks by the head of Google China, who came from Baidu.
Even before the Aurora attack, as a matter of national pride, we knew the very best Google could hope for was 30% or 40% market share in China. Even France funded one or two attempts at a Francophone Google killer. I can't imagine the U.S. looking at a dominant search company based out of anywhere except North America (or perhaps the Anglophone Five Eyes) and not butting up significant nationalistic barriers.
Google was hoping to make profits, but they knew they would never be dominant. This made their exit much easier.
If Google was serious about China, they would have had a more obscure non-Google-branded name for their Chinese joint venture and would have branded their front page much differently. The reasons would take a large post, but Chinese web pages tend to be much more "busy", and Chinese language searches have a much higher percentage of "navigational searches". (If you search for [Facebook], you're almost certainly just trying to just get a link to facebook.com, and are basically using the search engine like a bookmark page.) I understand Google's need for a consistent U.I., but they really should have had a non-Google-branded U.I. that was better suited to the Chinese market.
When you say "Chinese market" you mean mainland Chinese market. Google does just fine in Hong Kong and Taiwan, while Baidu is completely MIA outside of mainland China even in markets with significant Chinese populations.
This is something I never understood. Google has this "do no evil" value and because staying in China involved compromising this value they left. The result is that the Chinese people are short one search engine as well as _any_ good that Google could have done. This seems ultimately more evil to me. It's good for Google because they can say they upheld their values, and it's good for the Chinese government because now they have one less external factor to manage in their control of information. Perhaps there is more to this picture than I am seeing but that has always been my view.
There's an ancient Chinese story where a farmer criticizes an official who exiled himself because the government is corrupt. As the fisherman departs he sings: "when the water of the river is clean I wash my hat in the river, when the waters are dirty I wash my feet in the river". What good can the virtuous official do living out in the mountains? Instead you should adapt your participation to the conditions of the playing field.
It's good for Google because they can say they upheld their values, and it's good for the Chinese government because now they have one less external factor to manage in their control of information. Perhaps there is more to this picture than I am seeing but that has always been my view
I don't see how they could have stayed in China and not been involved in things that are truly evil. When the government phones you up and tells you to hide search results related to babies dying from diluted baby formula (yes, this happened), could you in good conscience tell one of your engineers to add that filter? How could a company like Google possibly retain good people when they have to ask them to do the bidding of such an evil government?
Yes I agree, this is an angle that actually came to my mind after posting my original comment. At the end of the day there had to be Google engineers in China doing the job, real people actually implementing censorship. So if Google being in China meant that employees had to be involved in inhumane acts, I'm not surprised they would leave.
It's always about what one considers valuable. The Chinese government will block Google if Google didn't give them access and censorship.
Google could spend eternity fighting this until the government changes (ha), or pull our and upload their value of organizing the world's information without* censorship.
In your eyes, they are more evil for not bringing their products to China, in their eyes, they are more noble for making their anti-censorship* stance loud and clear.
Apple in this case can be viewed as doing good (assuming having an iPhone and access to Apple's stuff is good for people) or as putting money over censorship values. It's all about which angle to look from.
The world isn't hurting for search engines, mail providers or luxury smartphones. Maybe Google decided that fighting the Chinese government is not the right battle and allowing direct censorship is not a value they are willing to compromise on even if it means losing access to several millions of users
*Yeah, filter bubbles exist and Google controlling search results and ads can be viewed as evil but that's a different conversation.
You have articulated the conundrum of all "social justice" boycotts. I first encountered these arguments in the 1980s when universities and big corps were deciding how to engage with the apartheid regime in South Africa. The specifics are different, but the issues are the same. (I'm NOT equating the two cases. )
Here's some factors that could be a guide: What do the citizens themselves want? Is the boycott merely symbolic, or is it linked to other boycotts and pressure across a wide front, so that it is liable to have the desired outcome? Are the boycotters committed to long term pressure, publicity, and engagement with stakeholders in the other country?
Former Google engineer here. There's a subtle but significant semantic difference between "Don't be evil" (the real motto) and "Do no evil" (a confusion between the Hippocratic oath and the Google motto).
Can you explain the semantic difference between being and doing in this context?
What I'm mostly interested in is how you can rationalize doing evil while not considering yourself as being evil. Is it based on the idea that you might do evil unintentionally or that you could be coerced into it? Are there other reasons for the distinction?
If Google has determined that censorship is evil, but an open society is a noble goal, then "Do no evil" would prevent Google from collaborating with censors under any circumstances. "Don't be evil" would allow collaborating with censors if Google believed that collaborating with censors was the fastest way to inducing a closed society to open up (or some other greater good).
Do no evil = "No, we are not going to torture these prisoners of war, period."
Don't be evil = "It's OK to waterboard them a little if they deserve it. Remember, we are the good guys, we're here to help."
(See also: rationale for the My Lai Massacre. Very similar thinking, it's possible to excuse awful things when you're the hero(es) of your own (indoctrinated) narrative.)
Other reasons are because people are really good at rationalization and at cognitive dissonance. Google does plenty of borderline-evil stuff, but as long as they can shrug their shoulders and say "well, it's not like we're evil, just some of the stuff we do is" then apparently it's ok.
> The result is that the Chinese people are short one search engine as well as _any_ good that Google could have done.
One question: do they - Chinese people - even care? It's not exactly "good" - whatever Google could have done in such an environment - if you try to force it on an unwilling crowd.
Leave the apps in the app store and make the government make the next move.
They're fucking Apple, they can do a lot to help finally topple that mess. It's something that needs to happen in my lifetime, and I don't think it's unreasonable to expect a company who otherwise trumpets about social justice to be a part of it.
They can't do a lot if the resultant stock crash causes the board to fire the executives. Executives call the shots but in publicly traded companies their continued employment is decided by the board (who represent investors, who literally only care about stock prices).
Really the big problem here are the constraints imposed on publicly traded companies, which I think do more harm than good in many cases.
I would imagine Google thought the same. If this was five or more years ago and Xiaomi did not exist, there may be more pressure from the people. However there is a good alternative to the iPhone and the government would probably just say take it or leave it. It would give the government the perfect excuse to ban iPhone and have their citizens use a home grown phone that would be more compliant to the government's wishes.
Then China blocks all Apple devices and services. In 5 minutes Apple is demolished in China.
So what’s Apple’s response? Close factories? That would disrupt their supply chain for years, potentially collapsing the company. All the cash in the world can’t retool and rebuild a factory overnight.
If anyone cares about this situation “for real,” you’d boycott every single Chinese made product because by owning a Chinese product, YOU are a hypocrite. You can’t expect Apple to stop selling to China if you aren’t willing to stop buying from China.
While you’re at it, stop buying from Mexico because elements of the government facilitate the execution of reporters. Don’t buy from Indonesia because they give the death penalty for minor drug offenses. Find me a country and I can find you something about which to be outraged. Even the “progressive” EU has enacted or attempted to enact laws abridging free speech. You can’t even print the word Nazi in Germany without facing potential criminal charges. As horrible as Nazis and neo-Nazis are, censoring their speech is STILL a violation of human rights. Free speech isn’t just that with which you agree, but it’s the expression of ideas – regardless of how detestable they may be. Germany sees Nazi speech as a threat to public order and perhaps they are correct, but in the same vein, China sees talk of Tiananmen or other such topics as threats to their public order. Should Google, Facebook and Apple pull outmoded Germany? Because it’s the exact same thing. We just happen to agree with censoring Nazi speech while we disagree with censoring “democracy-speech.” Both are censorship applied by a government due to a real or perceived threat to their systems.
Plenty of people here were willing to boycott US states over bathroom laws yet almost every single one of you has something you own made in China – a country with far bigger human rights issues than the hole in which one pees.
While pointing fingers at Apple, one ought to be pointing fingers at oneself as well.
Sanction based behavior is just another form a bullying. It's not much different than physical, psychological or social bullying.
Similar to bullying, it doesn't work when the target can fight back. Sanction based actions just seem like bullshit to me and is actually exactly what China wants. It gives space for domestic equivalents to grow. (the trick is to having your self created monopoly not rot is to keep it in its toes)
China for better or worse is becoming (is) a global power. It's the only country that is managing efficiently at its scale so criticisms fall flat. It's great for western indignation for them to feel-good about themselves. The realization that the previous bullying is no longer working creates the same sense of desperation and grasping for relevance that trump supporters have.
I'd rather the market make the decisions. Not because they don't have failure points but because they organically create understanding through mixing of values. The non-organic too down forcing of value systems doesn't work unless one party can effectively bully the other.
> What would you rather have them do? What would "sticking to their guns" involve?
Start building factories elsewhere. Help put together a similar manufacturing ecosystem in a different country. Automate their manufacture so much that it no longer matters if labor is done in China.
If Apple paid an extra 10-20% to locate factories elsewhere and started pulling out of China, it would be a gigantic hit to China while being only a 20% hit to Apple. And Apple could threaten China instead of China threatening Apple. And China wouldn't dream of making these kinds of requests again.
Apple has more leverage than they are willing to use.
Or would you rather have them not "make so much noise" about social justice?