I'll repost my comment from the other thread that got flagged for being a dupe:
They absolutely stake out moral positions on issues like this all the time. The difference is they only do it in the West where rule of law prevails and they can actually exert influence.
They've done it with various anti-LGBT efforts that have taken place around the US, they've done it with the fight with the FBI and they're doing it right now in Australia [1], among others.
What they don't do is shoot themselves in the head in some misguided attempt at ideological purity.
Also this seems absurd to me:
>The company has not fully tested its political and economic leverage in China. It hasn’t tested the public’s immense love of its products. It hasn’t publicly threatened any long-term consequences — like looking to other parts of the world to manufacture its products.
If China's authoritarian regime is objectionable then do what countries have always done in history: isolate them economically, diplomatically or politically. Try to foment and support an insurgency or revolution or just invade them yourselves. I'm not sure anyone is willing to risk nuclear war to bring democracy to China but those are your options. Apple isn't a vessel for anyone's foreign policy objectives and it isn't a substitute for the state.
Apple has most certainly taken a moral stance in the past as you point out. The galling part of the article to me was "The company has not fully tested its political and economic leverage in China." It is not Apple's job to take a political stance. They can if they want, as evidenced by the examples you laid out, but there is no requirement. If the NYT wants to talk politics and precedence, perhaps they should direct their criticisms toward the U. S. government, et. al., who collectively think that China's membership in the WTO, and therefore I assume free trade with China, is just a-okay.
Apple is playing by the rules, and this time decided that this is not the hill they want to die on. That's their prerogative. Don't like the rules? Then go complain to those that make the rules to begin with, not those that play by those rules.
They still potentially can fix the problem. Wouldn't it be great if they used their influence to help fix things?
I agree that there's a "choose your battles" aspect to this. Considering what Apple did with the San Bernandino case, this seems (ideologically) right, but the potential losses are pretty high.
What I read from that is that you do not think that it is a more appropriate role for, say, the U. S. government. If that is the case, we're just going to have to agree to disagree. My POV is that to a large extent the U.s government has that leeway because they don't have financial incentives/disincentives to steer their decisions (this falls apart when viewed in a larger economic sense, but bear with me). Instead, the government makes laws, decrees, and treaties that fit within a worldview of what benefits the country as a whole, and to some extent to cajole other countries who might have a different worldview (Iran or Russia, for example). Or put another way, we leave it to the government to represent our moral, ethical and economic views of how the world should work. Whereas Apple should represent a different view: the desires of those that own stock with the symbol "AAPL", and their desire to make money (where are the "fiduciary obligation" folks when you need them?) If AAPL happens to take a stand I agree with, hurray, I'll buy more of their products and probably more of their stock. If they mistreat workers, I'll dig in and find out if I still feel comfortable giving them my monetary support (personally, no worse than others, maybe a little better). But what I don't expect from AAPL is for them to instigate "regime change" or whatever else it is the NYT is expecting them to do.
Anyway, that turned out longer than I wanted, but that's where I'm coming from.
Sure, if you are an US citizen, you can argue that it should be US government's job to represent your ideals in the wider world.
But your government is not the only party responsible for representing your moral or political positions in the world.
For example, the US government collectively is not particularly famous for 100% morally upstanding behavior.
Granted, the US behaves often better than other great powers, and certainly it represents many ideals of democracy and liberty more than other contending powers. But consider the mess that was Iran-Contra affair or the various regimes ranging from unsavory authoritarianism to sheer terrorism (with "disappearances" and torture) CIA supported in Latin America in the name of anti-communism. (God forbid someone propose an idea of land reform in South America or advancing workers' and natives' rights against UFC, despite that's how numerous European countries avoided communism.) Did these actions (and various other questionable shenanigans the US government has been partial to) represent your ethical positions?
It's everyone's job to do it, and what any government does is only part of that. For example, you mentioned AAPL stock owners. According to any sane ethical system, the moral duty of any individual CEO or a member of board or stock owner as a human person with rights and corresponding duties to act ethically overrides their financial or legal duty to maximize corporate profits.
The US Government is supposed to represent the people, and thus must uphold that people's values. The US government is a moral agent.
A person is a moral agent.
Though many here are happy to concede the reality that Apple is comprised of individuals and that it exists as an organisation as a part of society, and just view it as a profit-maximising entity. This is perverse. A corporation is a moral agent, and when it's morality conflicts with it's profits, morality should win. We'd expect nothing less of literally everybody/everything else.
I otherwise agree, but I don't know if Apple is a moral agent - that discussion will into quite complex philosophical issues. But certainly each individual person making decisions at Apple is a moral agent.
A “moral agent” is not “an agent that acts according to correct moral principles” but “an agent with the appropriate facilties that morality or immorality can be attributed to it”.
Apple certainly does have agents that are not moral agents (e.g., automatons like Siri), but for a different reason than you suggest.
> the appropriate facilties that morality or immorality can be attributed to it
i m saying that the top brass making decisions are not acting as moral agents, because they don't feel the responsibility of any of the choices insofar as it increases the profit of the company.
Not feeling responsibility doesn't make you not a moral agent (whether you feel responsible is a separate issue from whether you have the capacity which makes it sensible for moral responsibility to be assigned to you), and adopting “advancing the profit of the company” as a value that overrides all other concerns (and that one is responsible for), in any case, is making a moral decision (that is, one about morality, whether or not any other observer or any objective morality that may or may not exist would paint it as a morally correct.)
Depending on your viewpoint, it's not even a problem. Telling China that their government is objectively wrong and should do things differently is pretty hypocritical unless we'd accept them telling us that our respective governments are wrong and should change.
> Telling China that their government is objectively wrong and should do things differently is pretty hypocritical unless we'd accept them telling us that our respective governments are wrong and should change.
Uh, did you miss the whole iPhone/FBI thing here. Not only did many of us in the US (and virtually all of us on HN) accept them telling us that our government was wrong and should change, we relished it! We were glad someone finally stood up to the US government and its surveillance overreach.
Could it be that many, perhaps most, Chinese would think the same way? I suspect so, given how many of them use VPNs there.
It would be hypocritical to say someone is wrong while, on the same point, say someone else is right (despite the actions being the same).
It's not hypocritical to say someone is wrong without mentioning all the other people are wrong. You can't list literally every bad thing that happens in every press release, and you can scope criticism.
The big issue is that they'd actually have to shoot themselves in the head: they can't exist in China without giving into things like this. And Tim Cook can't keep his job if he decides to leave his 1st (or 2nd, depending on the quarter) largest market for moral reasons.
I'm not really sure if its a rule of law issue (though China definitely has problems there). One problem is that western companies generally must follow the law in China because they are easy to make examples of while their lawyers won't sign off on anything "shady." Chinese companies, however, have no such limitations, and will bend the rules all the time, often with minimal consequences.
Ya, for the big one, Baidu is the ultimate search engine for porn and health care scams, where they used to derive most of their revenue. Compared to Chinese Bing which is pretty clean with pretty effective porn filters (but also makes almost no money).
Payments via AliPay and WePay were technically illegal before they were legalized post facto after they became popular. A western company could have never gone near that.
All the western companies pay income tax on private health insurance benefits, while all the Chinese companies don't, because the law is unclear.
> Payments via AliPay and WePay were technically illegal before they were legalized post facto after they became popular. A western company could have never gone near that.
Huh. Sounds like a certain transportation company...
I'm familiar with users searching for porn but not health care scams.
Are you saying that Baidu was directing traffic to health care scams willingly?
Interesting remark on AliPay & WePay. I wonder what kind of agreements Chinese gov made with those companies after the fact.
Here's as good as any point to remember that a warrant canary disappeared from Apple's privacy text about a year ago. Before it was about "we will protect user's privacy".. then there was a big "privacy" announcement that had text about following the law etc. IMHO gov got to them and it's understandable - companies exist in frameworks set by governments. It's in Apple's best interest to comply with them. To suggest otherwise is a political stance, not an economic one.
Ya, Baidu got caught last year and got a slap on the wrist. Oddly enough, they were in it with a military hospital for that case, which should raise a lot of other eye brows.
China doesn't have rule of law, so everything is illegal but nothing is, if you can navigate that contradiction, then you just have to make sure your context isn't bad enough to be cracked down on. The same was true with Didi and anti-black cab laws (but Uber operates in the gray margins of those laws all the time, so there was no point in mentioning that).
China doesn't really care about your idealism. If you go against the government's interests, they will beat you down. This is one thing the Chinese companies get really well and allow them to play fast and lose with the law as long as they adhere to that one principal.
how about stop selling your single sided story? Baidu's involvement in those healthcare scams got its reputation totally trashed, which in turn failed numerous Baidu products. As a direct consequence, Baidu is now considered a tier-2 Internet company with almost weekly news reports talking about company XYZ is replacing Baidu.
it is also highly laughable for your private health insurance joke. there is _no_ Chinese law requiring any company to provide _private_ health insurance to anyone. Public healthcare levy is required by the law, that is all.
Jack Ma stealing tens of billions of dollars from Softbank and Yahoo by giving himself a very large stake in Ant Financial (completely unsupported by his ownership % in Alibaba), divesting it out of Alibaba without proper compensation.
Something like that is nearly unthinkable in the US or Western Europe. It would be equivalent to Jeff Bezos spinning off AWS and giving himself 2/3 ownership of it, without approval from AMZN shareholders.
You aren't making a fair comparison here. You will never be able to make a 1-1 comparisons between individuals in two countries. Jeff Bezos and Jack Ma are different people and live in different countries; their actions are based on their environment.
The heart of your argument is that a corporation is executing a transaction that could possible be illegal elsewhere: the US or Western Europe is better because this would not be possible here.
If that is your argument, I can think of two examples off the top of my head:
1. Goldman Sachs executive in 1MDB scandal
2. Banks offloading their mortgage-back securities positions by selling the directly opposite positions to their clients
Corporations executing shady transactions in the US or Western Europe is not as uncommon or "unthinkable" as you might imagine. Your argument stems from a enthocentric point of view and romanticizing one system over another by neglecting all the bad from one side.
You are not using the term "What aboutism" right. My argument isn't about Americans does it also, but rather providing counter argument to op's that it is "unthinkable" to think it would happen in the US or Western Europe.
I also fail to see how Chinese companies has anything related to my argument. Just because Chinese companies were involved doesn't weaken it.
You are seeing things through tinted shades before you even have the chance to analyze my argument. You are framing the argument as China vs US. I am pointing out the flaw in op's argument. See the difference ;). Your reply was rude.
Rumors said that Alibaba's IPO involved Boyu Capital. Jiang Zhicheng, the grandson of former President Jiang Zemin, was stake holder of the latter one. No wonder why Alibaba got through all the obstacles establishing its payment service under a murky supervision in early 2000s.
> Apple isn't a vessel for anyone's foreign policy objectives and it isn't a substitute for the state.
You're absolutely right, and you should follow this to its logical conclusion. Apple only does what's in its best interests. The company consistently acts to strengthen its brand whenever possible to make more money.
It's irrational to expect a corporation, whether it's Apple or any other entity, to act ethically. Every decision they make, from sponsoring LGBT events to pushing back against the FBI, is made carefully with their brand in mind. Imagine what would happened, for instance, if Apple hadn't pushed back against the FBI. Their customers would have been enraged, just as they are now.
The real question is this: What would you expect Apple to do as a shareholder?
>Imagine what would happened, for instance, if Apple hadn't pushed back against the FBI. Their customers would have been enraged, just as they are now.
They absolutely would not have. HN-types might have, but many of them were also enraged about many of Apple's business practices over the years including their App Store policies, not being "open", etc. And it hasn't had any measurable impact on Apple's success as a business.
The public at large wouldn't have cared just like they don't care when Apple complies with lawful orders for information as they do now [1].
Perhaps not. But Apple absolutely benefited from the overwhelmingly positive press coverage it received as a result of their decision to oppose the FBI. And when the FBI withdrew their request, Apple looked like the winner. So yes, I do believe they opposed the FBI in that instance to strengthen their brand.
Trump called for a boycott on Apple because of that, and that was when he was somewhat credible. It was a bad short term play financially, but I believe it was a good long term play. Apple plays the long game, one of the few public companies that still do. What they bought is that I believe Apple implements more security and privacy measures in their phone than any of the competition, and actively improve it as a priority.
Remember this document? Apple was the last company to be subverted either willingly nor not. I'll bet it pissed Cook the hell of that Apple was even on this list. I believe they completely revamped their cloud architecture after that.
Practically all my non-technical friends required several conversations to understand why Apple did what it did in the San Bernardino case. On one side you have a company refusing to unlock a mass shooter's phone. On the other side you have an abstract discussion about rights and technology. Guess which one appeals to the broader denominator.
> They absolutely would not have. HN-types might have, but many of them were also enraged about many of Apple's business practices over the years including their App Store policies, not being "open", etc. And it hasn't had any measurable impact on Apple's success as a business.
People are always saying things like this, but we never really have any good data on what the alternative would have been. Just because you're in the black doesn't mean you haven't lost billions of dollars in additional profits.
Apple had the first mover advantage with the iPhone. There is a fair argument that they would still have the bulk of the market if they had been more open, instead of conceding the majority share to Android.
I wonder what Apple's reaction would be if China (or another large non-western market) demanded to have root on people's iphones. If Apple said, it's our HW design, it can't be compromised, I'm sure some market with enough heft could come back and say, make one specific to our market or you don't sell here. At that point they'd likely capitulate.
I'd guess they'd downgrade security on clearly-identifiable devices. And that's okay. We lost the moral high ground on mass surveillance many years ago.
Yes, once a country obtains nuclear weapons, the options of influence are greatly reduced. You can no longer invade, you can no longer regime change, you might be able to install government antagonists, but that's about it. That's why all these non-nuclear countries want nuclear weapons.
Apple's leaders take strong stances in those American political positions because those stances are against the tribal outgroup of the people who control Apple.
The tribal outgroup is, of course, American conservatives - especially social conservatives and Christians.
Of course any reasonable person would acknowledge that China's government is far more guilty of all the same wrongs as American conservatives, and many more. However, China isn't the outgroup of the tribe that controls Apple. They are a "far group" - just some people on the other side of the world doing terrible things.
What's more, they're non-white, which in the far-left view means the real moral responsibility for their actions must be traced back to the decisions of a white man some time in the colonial past. Ultimately all wrongs point to the true tribal outgroup - white male Western conservatives.
So Apple's leaders don't really care emotionally about anything China's government is doing. Because the tribal lines don't point to caring.
]Fighting against American conservatives is really rewarding, in self-image and social standing, and it doesn't cost or risk much business-wise, and it feels good to make them suffer because activists don't like them anyway. Fighting against China isn't rewarding at all, and costs a lot more, and people are trained to see them as hypo-agentic victims since they're non-white in the first place. That's the difference.
This situation underlines and ideological stance that we all take for granted but that actually went questioned in the past:
That business and human rights are perpendicular issues. Actually it all started from the idea that free market causes a freer society. I think it is now clear that this causality is not true, but now proponents of unregulated free markets changed their stance to "Meh, that's the way we have done for decades, let's just keep that way."
My stance is that a global free-market is a good objective and should be encouraged, that borders should gradually disappear. However, encouraging goods and capital flow through otherwise tight borders is not helping reach that goal.
My theory is that 4 important things cross borders: goods, money, people and information. All 4 must have the same level of freedom. Imbalances should be addressed. For instance, China does not easily let people and information flow in and out of its territory, yet it lets funds flow and even subsidizes goods going out of it (Which is why Shenzhen to LA shipping can be cheaper than SF to LA). We should link these issues together. Either by funding and helping people and information cross these borders or, if impossible, by taxing goods and funds.
Actually a country that prevents people going out of it but let money go in and goods go out is the opposite of what the theory of democratic capitalism is about. It is a setup that allows outsourcing slavery. Free market in that case is not a perpendicular issue to this, but the very cause of the problem.
What I am proposing is a world where borders stop neither people, goods, information or funds. Most of the neoliberal horrors come from an imbalance of freedom between these 4 freedoms.
They absolutely stake out moral positions on issues like this all the time. The difference is they only do it in the West where rule of law prevails and they can actually exert influence.
They've done it with various anti-LGBT efforts that have taken place around the US, they've done it with the fight with the FBI and they're doing it right now in Australia [1], among others.
What they don't do is shoot themselves in the head in some misguided attempt at ideological purity.
Also this seems absurd to me:
>The company has not fully tested its political and economic leverage in China. It hasn’t tested the public’s immense love of its products. It hasn’t publicly threatened any long-term consequences — like looking to other parts of the world to manufacture its products.
If China's authoritarian regime is objectionable then do what countries have always done in history: isolate them economically, diplomatically or politically. Try to foment and support an insurgency or revolution or just invade them yourselves. I'm not sure anyone is willing to risk nuclear war to bring democracy to China but those are your options. Apple isn't a vessel for anyone's foreign policy objectives and it isn't a substitute for the state.
[1] https://www.macrumors.com/2017/07/20/apple-talks-australian-...