So what had fundamentally changed here? Is it just that China is a bigger market now? Did Google think they actually had enough leverage to get the Chinese to back down? Are the founders simply less idealistic than before?
The "moral compass" in the ad/surveillance industry was always set up to indicate the direction of money, and only existed as a tool for PR to begin with.
Hypothesis: the rise of the right to be forgotten in Europe served as a stepping stone. Free speech absolutists within the company could not be defeated in one step, but could be defeated in two steps.
I am not saying that right to be forgotten is halfway through from free-speech absolutism to full-blown state control of information, but come on. If you ever jumped from a high place, you know that every foot of height makes a lot of difference.
Right To Be Forgotten isn't a censorship move, it's toward personal and individual freedom, not corporate or government secrecy. However, you probably aren't too far from the truth that it is because of European laws.
Antitrust and privacy laws in Europe is going to make a lot of their business less profitable there. Which would lead to new efforts to make up that profit elsewhere. China's essentially an untapped market for Google, so its not a shock for the drive for money to eventually bring them back there.
Relating this to RTBF is interesting, but your thinking is muddled. Europe created RTBF, not Google. So the hypothesis that RTBF is part of a Google corporate plan to "defeat" internal activists is baseless. It just makes no sense on the face of it.
What I meant was: EU created RTBF, Google went "well, we must comply with local laws, and we can't get out of Europe". From there, it's a smaller leap to comply with worse local laws.
They don’t have to pretend to have a moral compass anymore, they’re already massive. Besides, people have seen through the lie of “don’t be evil” so why leave money on the table by living the lie? They just want money, lots and lots of money. They pretended to have a conscience when that was advantageous and dropped the act the moment it was more advantageous to do so.
They will never overtake Baidu, who have leaks of Googles algorithm, more data to train AI on, government support, an existing (better) product in asian languages, and a massive userbase.
Google enlisted the help of the NSA after their internal code repository was hacked. (And before the NSA hacked Google for surveillance purposes).
> [...] we detected a highly sophisticated and targeted attack on our corporate infrastructure originating from China that resulted in the theft of intellectual property from Google.
> These attacks and the surveillance they have uncovered--combined with the attempts over the past year to further limit free speech on the web--have led us to conclude that we should review the feasibility of our business operations in China. We have decided we are no longer willing to continue censoring our results on Google.cn, and so over the next few weeks we will be discussing with the Chinese government the basis on which we could operate an unfiltered search engine within the law, if at all. We recognize that this may well mean having to shut down Google.cn, and potentially our offices in China.
> Lanxiang, in east China’s Shandong Province, is a huge vocational school that was established with military support and trains some computer scientists for the military. The school’s computer network is operated by a company with close ties to Baidu, the dominant search engine in China and a competitor of Google.
> “I think it’s impossible for our students to hack Google or other U.S. companies because they are just high school graduates and not at an advanced level. [...]
I just realized that doing the above sourcing on google.cn would probably not have yielded any good results. This means Google itself is part of the censored content. That is pretty scary!
I'm sure they'll be able to overtake Baidu. Baidu's search product is terrible. The results are almost always unusable. The only times I find them useful is when it links to a quora-equivalent website where someone has asked your exact query.
However good or bad the product is, I would be very surprised if the Chinese government would allow Google to win significant market share against domestic companies. They might want Google in China for leverage, but they certainly wouldn't want them to be dominant.
My immediate reaction was "how can the CCP possibly cripple Google so much that Baidu can compete?". Anyone who's lived in China will have passionate views on how terrible Baidu's product is.
If there is any eastward leakage of Google's code, it's certainly not obvious in day-to-day usage of Baidu's search engine.
Not sure if search is what they really care about. With their exit from the Chinese market in 2010, they gave up quite a bit in the Play Store, Youtube, etc. I think they want an entry back into China for the extras, rather than the search.
Anyways, I still think Baidu is pretty garbage and I constantly rely on Bing for inside China searches.
How about this for accuracy: "It is definitely worse to have a startup phase with the motto 'don't be evil' and then later heavily demote it once they've got everyone's data"
Still reads as irrational to me, but at least it's technically accurate.
It's worth remembering that "data" as they say stales very quickly. Knowing that you ordered a package two months ago is far less interesting than knowing you're expecting one next week. Or that you'll be booking a plane trip soon, and wouldn't you just love to know Delta is cheapest on that date?
"Having your data" isn't a binary concept. Their services degrade substantially once you turn off the firehose. You'll still get ads, but they won't be tailored to you. Maps won't be able to show your current position. Assistant won't be able to recognize your voice.
And that's fine, if you prefer that approach. But the concept of "having your data" in a historical context is meaningless. The only thing that matters is if that firehose is still available to them.
> The only thing that matters is if that firehose is still available to them.
Which it obviously is, so I'm not sure what point you were making viz. Google. The "turning off" of the items you mention is also entirely a user-visualization exercise. All of your data is still there inside the panopticon. Even not using Google service anywhere does not free you from it, if you send email to a Gmail user, lo, Google has it. So concerns about the behavior of a company with the market presence of Google are very relevant.
>The "turning off" of the items you mention is also entirely a user-visualization exercise.
Prove it. They offer controls for almost every service they provide. If you're going to claim they're visual-only, then prove that these controls do nothing.
> It's worth remembering that "data" as they say stales very quickly. Knowing that you ordered a package two months ago is far less interesting than knowing you're expecting one next week.
Comparatively less, yes, but knowing about all your packages is still very interesting and hugely privacy sensitive.
> You'll still get ads, but they won't be tailored to you.
TBH, all tailoring I've seen is comically bad. Yeah, they can know I bought shoes so they would show me shoe ads for the next three months. As if that's how humans behave - once we're in "shoe heat", we do nothing but buy shoes for three months and the task of the good ad system is to capture when the "shoe heat" starts and capitalize on it. I think if one wrote a comedy show about robots trying to understand human society and getting it hilariously wrong every time, the behavior of ad networks could supply great material for years.
> But the concept of "having your data" in a historical context is meaningless.
No it's not. There's a lot of private things in one's past than can be dug up and (ab)used. Ask any politician who went through an electoral campaign.
>Yeah, they can know I bought shoes so they would show me shoe ads for the next three months.
You might be surprised. Some people buy far more shoes than they need. Be it for fashion or simply the love of shopping, I wouldn't be surprised at all if targeting shoe ads at recent shoppers actually made sense.
>No it's not. There's a lot of private things in one's past than can be dug up and (ab)used.
I'm speaking strictly in terms of their business model and services. That's where live data is essential. Fear of potential blackmail seems pretty far removed from that context.
What does "censored" mean in this context? No anti-communist or anti-party propaganda?
Personally I feel that Google has slowly become more and more censored over the recent years, to the point that I do searches on multiple search engines if I'm not so sure about the Google results.
More than often there's not only a filter-bubble in my results, but there's more and more sites that suddenly disappeared over the years, but are high-ranking on DDG, Bing, Yandex, ... — especially in February / March 2018 there was a kind-of-extreme disappearance of sites in the results where I previously used Google to get to them.
Means they will hide the same stuff Bing has and will hide more stuff as and when the gov tells them to. You want to be inside the firewall you need to be “legal”
Wonder how Uber's experience in China will play out here -- people variously interpret it as state interference clearing the path for local competitors OR Didi being much better at meeting chinese cultural expectations for taxis.
This feels like a very different world than 1998 when G could launch an upstart search engine with 'free the world's information' in their DNA. in 1998 even in the tech bubble people still had no idea how the open web platform would be used. Now it's some combination of closed platform dominance, cookie farms, land grabs and spam.
Not surprising G is under pressure to play ball in china; the prevalence of android there (albeit in weird open forms sans G maps & tools) gives the government a geopolitical interest in tying some strings.
This is so smart. I’m so happy for Alphabet. They seem to have recovered their mojo. Engagement not activism. I never understood why they held off so long but glad they finally respecting the host country and providing a service tailored to local needs rather than trying and failing to impose their perspective on a foreign nation. Happy.
In other news I find it hilarious FBs license was revoked in Hangzhou just now. Suck it. Hahaha.
Why should there be a different standard for Google and other tech companies to not expand into China.
If we have a problem with how their government works policy should be applied that prevents/manages how businesses subject to our laws operate abroad.
The majority of people don't really care how corporations behave.
If they did Google search/gmail/maps would not be so popular.
They have the right price point(0$) for people to ignore any moral misgivings they may have. I'm guilty of this and up to my neck in google services
>Why should there be a different standard for Google and other tech companies to not expand into China.
This exactly.
I would even make a stronger case. It's not fair to expect a technology company to fight a major world economic power. This is a failure of US and EU governments. They should pressure China to liberalize their government and provide a level economic playing field (it is insane what China gets away with with respect to the roadblocks it places on Western companies to do business there).
Neither US or EU are the world police. They have no rights and should not have any to pressure any country to push their own idea of how things should work in another country, just like how China and others don't demand such and even if they do that doesn't make it less wrong.
this is a weak argument, as it can be made for literally any situation.
Israel massacring Palestinians? Hey man, they can do whatever they want, we don't have any right to tell them not to and it doesn't make what they're doing any less wrong!
Agree they are not the world police but for EU/US citizens they are our government and should reflect our views and morals.
Do we believe in censorship?
Do we believe in borderline cheap labor?
I don't have the answers but there are hard questions there, not just for our governments but for us as voters.
> They have no rights and should not have any to pressure any country to push their own idea of how things should work in another country
To believe that China does not attempt to influence other countries is naive. China puts a great deal of pressure on other nations with regard to things like recognition of Taiwan or inviting the Dalai Lama to speak. These have occasionally been in the news over the last few years, e.g. China’s retaliatory measures against Norway for Liu Xiabo winning the Nobel Peace Prize, but in fact they go back decades – when Michelangelo Antonioni was showing his documentary film Chung Kuo around in the early 1970s, in European countries where a screening was organized the local Chinese embassy would raise scandal.
China certainly has a very strong view on the make-up of the region, much is historical, some of it fair. However, we don't see them going around converting everyone to communism. In fact, even all the investment they are doing in Africa right now, very little of the social aspects of china are being exported. Xi Jinping has always maintained: china is not for export.
If an American pays a Chinese businessman in China a bribe, that's an FCPA [1] violation. If the U.S. government wanted to prevent American technology companies from helping China's dictator build a modern dystopia, it would have precedent.
The US and EU have (relatively) free markets where Chinese companies can compete. But not the other way. They can simply stop trading with China unless China opens their market as well.
I think that point would have some merit if US, EU and China worked completely in isolation at every level. Let everybody sort their mess like they want. But clearly that's not the case, China's economy is very tightly linked to ours, as such the way we trade with them influences their internal politics. When a US or EU company moves production to China it's not politically neutral, this company implicitly endorses the Chinese political system. As such I don't see why we couldn't regulate these things to suit our principles and interests.
It's not about saying "stop censoring the internet or we'll nuke you", it's about saying "if you want to do business with us we demand that you meet these standards, otherwise no biggy, we'll just go elsewhere."
And China does attempt to do the same thing, for instance in many African countries. It's less obvious because they're still ramping up their diplomacy, US and EU have a huge headstart there.
You make it look like google would starve without China. Like they have to go there and participate. Shifting the blame for your lack of ethics onto some government is ridiculous in this context. My god...where is your shame?
Do you have no sense of your own hypocrisy? I am certain you have 0 qualms in using and buying Chinese manufactured products, or buying services and products from companies that operate in China. And yet here we are with you lecturing from your soapbox on who should be or shouldn't be ashamed of their actions. Look to yourself first before moralizing at others.
There is a difference between not having a choice and openly advertising and justifying unethical behavior. The fact that this is the only sentence you've touched speaks for itself.
>There is a difference between not having a choice
You have no choice?
>and justifying unethical behavior.
I get it. It's not unethical when you engage in commerce with a regime you find unethical, or when you buy from all the other companies that manufacture their goods in China ... but it's unethical if Google doesn't want to ignore 1.4 billion people?
>The fact that this is the only sentence you've touched speaks for itself.
As opposed to the other three snide and arrogant sentences? If you'd like a good-faith discussion please lead by example.
> It's not unethical when you engage in commerce with a regime you find unethical or when you buy from all the other companies that manufacture their goods in China
Who says it's not unethical? Why are you putting words in peoples' mouths?
On one hand you talk about having a good-faith discussion but then you go ahead and base your argument off of words you've put in someone else's mouth.
> but it's unethical if Google doesn't want to ignore 1.4 billion people?
Most people find corruption of data far worse than the absence of data. I'd rather not be told anything than be told a lie.
>Who says it's not unethical? Why are you putting words in peoples' mouths?
OK. I guess I made the reasonable assumption that buying Chinese goods or buying goods from companies that do business in Chinese is not intrinsically unethical since it is something is completely pervasive. The fact that neither the public, nor democratic governments, nor any companies have any qualms
So I'm sorry if I stumbled upon a hypocrite who hates himself for engaging in the unethical action of living in a modern globalized society.
>On one hand you talk about having a good-faith discussion
I sure do and still do. You tell me, was OP's first comment a good-faith start to a discussion? If not, why are you hassling me? Because you agree with OP - that's the standard here?
>Most people find corruption of data far worse than the absence of data.
Got stats for that? Or are we projecting how we feel on the rest of the world.
But to rephrase it, do you think Chinese citizens should have the option to use the same products that their peers in other countries do? The actual point I made however had a different focus, mainly - do you think a company who competes with other companies can just ignore a market of 1.4 billion people when none of their other competitors do? Companies go bankrupt all the time. Even a multinational Fortune 100 company will have a life expectancy of 40-50 years. So the entire point was:
- No western government hasn't taken steps to isolate this 'unethical' regime.
- The public is perfectly fine with travelling to China, buying from China, doing business with companies who do business in China.
- All of Google's competitors are in China.
But Google is evil because they only lasted 8 years of their self-imposed exile (and if you remember, their leaving China was precipitated by Chinese hacking attack against their servers).
Turn your mouse around. Where is it made?
This is true since it was a joke in the 90s.
> I get it. It's not unethical when you engage in commerce with a regime you find unethical, or when you buy from all the other companies that manufacture their goods in China ... but it's unethical if Google doesn't want to ignore 1.4 billion people?
I never said it's not unethical. You say that I say that. Which is quite weak. I hope this is the result of you realizing what you did and now trying to dig yourself out by shifting blame to others.
And people in this thread make it sound that without Google, China would be this free and uncensored country. The reality is that all search engines are already censored, so one more has little impact. Google's job isn't to decide how China works, it's to provide value to users, and by almost all definitions, this move will provide a non-negative impact.
You’re an immoral and evil person. Anyone who makes excuses for the powerful restricting the rights of people with limited power is a horrible human being. You should be absolutely ashamed of yourself.
We've banned this account for egregiously violating the site guidelines with this comment and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17661668. You can't post this way, regardless of how right you are or feel. We all know what the online shaming culture leads to, and we don't want that here.
If you don't want to be banned on HN, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. Those are at https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
What people here don't understand is that the talk about censorship is of less than secondary importance there.
China's priority here is totally not to censor them, it is to conduct the "handshaking ritual" and have them becoming subject under China's "law." A "blood pack" - making them partners in crime.
The same was with Yahoo. They came to China talking only about "search," but got asked about "personal data of all China's opposition members residing in US." Not only they gave everything to China, but put extreme effort to cover their "special relationship" with China's ministry of interior.
In this light, please take a look at very, very close relationship Google tried to establish with Russian government in period of 2005-2010. We are talking about nothing less than first person accounts of people involved certifying that Google was sending all kinds of "consultants" to Russian political establishment, training them in online campaigning. Simultaneously, pages of Russian political opposition did disappear in Google's search. In light of recent events, this should be subject to much scrutiny.
P.S. : Additional comment on Google. At some moment they snapped after all. They closed their Russian development centre, and evacuated key personnel to Switzerland in unprecedented visa deal with government of Zurich.
P.P.S. : On person whom Sundar Pichay was meeting. I read name Wang Huning in the article, and instantly I felt that something "clicked." The name was familiar. Wang Huning is the man who is the real propaganda chief in the communist party. To know more of his view of USA, please read his work titled "America against America." I will not be surprised at all if he is the man entrusted with running their stratagems targeting USA.
>very interesting. can you provide me with some sources to learn more?
There was a minor intern in Russian presidential administration. Nicknamed "rLode" in the Internets. I happened to knew him as I attended language courses ran by high school he was attending.
He held his home page there "http://rlode.narod.ru/main.html" a man of unconcealed, borderline rabid views on social class. If you ever unearth an archived version of the page, I guarantee you will have some fun time reading it. If you dig further, finding his offline contacts are not hard.
Second was a Far Eastern strongman nicknamed "Twix" or "Nuts," man running arms trade in the Far East. How he came upon the info, I didn't know. Just assume that being a "big man" in Russia involves having lots of ears. I think you still can find him making appearances online on Russian .onion arms sales sites under different Japanese cartoons themed pseudonyms.
As for people of Google's side, ask any man relocated from Moscow to Zurich. Few people I knew there voiced their extreme surprise with their relocation coming unannounced, and being done with near military level of coordination. Officials were an everyday sight in their office on Balchug street. Just the fact that their office was on an island just a river across from Kremlin tells a lot. Nobody pays a ennormous premium to have office in this special place without having "being close to Kremlin" factor in mind.
On Wang, I once read the very few English translation of 半月谈 with some excerpts from his works. I never read the complete book. But the general theme is him telling party members to not to fear the USA as it is a frustrated, insecure, diseased society - something that has not to be feared, but taken advantage of. His main discontent with USA is it spreading that "plague" around the world. Following, it is CCPs role as "a global messiah" (oh my....) to rectify that, showing world "a different vision of a successful state system."
Do you remember the "Don't Be Evil" campaign? Google literally rose to prominence with this as their slogan. I would expect a company whose slogan is "Don't Be Evil" to completely shun a country who wants censored search.
I think they censor everywhere to a certain extent, this seems more like a concerted effort along the lines of, "what are we going to allow them to view" and not "should we remove the child porn links and isis videos and pirated movie links now that we know about them"
You would? Google is private company. If you want a powerful entity to live up to your standards, you should look into creating a government. I recommend a democracy; and hold your neighbors accountable for treating it as their own. Together, you can eventually build something to be proud of. It will probably never be perfect, but it will be yours for as long as you take care of it.
It was their standard, Eric Schmidt stood on many stages and said the same. Google being a private company has no bearing on my previous comment. Private companies don't have to be amoral. A much more capitalistic move would be to use their information and computation power to devalue the Yuan and acquire large swathes of the now defunct China and rename it Google. Now, not only can you search Google you can go to Google. This would be much more valuable than some pleb ad revenue.
That article is written very strangely. The middle of the article talks about how people mistakenly believe the motto was removed entirely, but a reader who only read the title and first couple paragraphs of their article would likely come away with the same mistaken belief.
They're entirely truthful. It's just oddly structured.
Following local laws does not imply you approve of it. That's like saying, if your company has business in a country that doesn't allow same-sex marriage, you as a company are against same-sex marriage too.
They don't make the law, neither should they. It's not Google's job to decide how China runs its country. And offering legitimate users legitimate service is neither immoral nor greedy.
The majority of Chinese people would much rather have a limited set of services than no services at all. They already do live with dozens of censored search engines, so one more makes no difference to them. Google isn't making their life any worse, but rather providing them services they didn't have before. How is that "evil"?
Your first comparison is pretty much a poorly formed Straw man, shame on you. It's doing business with an immoral government, Google and every other business that helps China (Saudi, etc. insert country here) censor the internet is just as immoral as those who ask them to do the censoring. Simply because other companies do it and the ignorant people are 'ok' with it does not mean they get a moral pass. They enable an oppressive government simply for more ad revenue. It's evil because those in control will use it as a tool to spy on and manipulate the population, I know I know, this goes on everywhere. But again, this is the company whose slogan was "Don't be evil". Restricting the information that the population has access to is the first step in hiding information that might cause the readers to question the authoritarians legitimacy. See manipulation vs. persuasion, https://aeon.co/ideas/how-to-tell-the-difference-between-per..., China seeks to hide relevant information that would likely cause the readers to change their opinion of the leaders. What would happen if the entire country could read about Tienanmen Square, identify the military personnel that would have been in charge of those troops, then attempt to track familial wealth and document any misdeeds the perps did before the event and after? This is likely a situation they hope to avoid, not hiding porn or rap videos, they want the population to have no access to information that will help them research the government and its institutions. Why are you so passionate about this being ok? Reading your comments you seem like a shill for google. What information do you think they want to hide, what exactly will be censored, that will tell us their intentions. Looking forward to your response.
It was shameful since the OP dropped an irrelevant straw man hand grenade into the conversation.
Buying tooth brushes or power tools from China may not be ideal, but it is no where near as bad as helping the Chinese goverment oppress its people by contributing to limiting their people's access to information. For a dollar.
Next thing you know, Google might do something really bad, like helping the US Army with some AI research. zOMG!
That's a naive and simplistic view of the world.
I grew up in the Middle East and really believed they needed some democracy.
In reality, moving to Democracy would result in more radicalization and instability and not less.
Without going into a long rant, there are toxic forces within many countries that would take their country on a profoundly bad route, by any universal standard, if Democracy were forced upon them.
I'd like to reply to pravebeatle anyway: I disagree with them, but they're polite and follow the HN guidelines, and their reply doesn't deserve to be flagged.
I know what you're saying - there's a lot of instability in the world and sometimes people make very poor choices - but democracy is a way to better handle the turbulence.
In essence, it gives us the ability to handle the coup that occurs every few years in unstable environments with less bloodshed - rather than the military taking control and ousting a leader, and a bunch of people dying or being imprisoned, another party takes over at the ballot box.
The newly elected ruler might be a really bad choice, but it's the people's perjorative to choose their leaders and it's a much better alternative than another coup.
By definition, “companies” are incentivized to prioritize capital pursuit over moral pursuit. It’s actually the most fundamental part of the whole concept.
Many democratic governments in the world, and particularly the most wealthy and powerful ones, are run by people who are (to a large unmeasurable extent) incentivized to do what companies want them to do. This is not a fundamental concept of a democratic government, but as long as the electorate fails to take responsibility for their own government’s behavior, the incentives remain in the company’s favor, which doesn’t make a very good case for democracy.
Democracy is a very slippery concept. America, for example, is well understood to not be a democracy, but it’s people seem to have convinced themselves it is. These kinds of miscalculations are really at the root of “why not”.
> By definition, “companies” are incentivized to prioritize capital pursuit over moral pursuit. It’s actually the most fundamental part of the whole concept.
Indeed. But if it's most reasonable economically, for a company to pay someone to dump their taxic waste into the sea, that doesn't mean it is morally OK to do so.
> Many democratic governments in the world, and particularly the most wealthy and powerful ones, are run by people who are (to a large unmeasurable extent) incentivized to do so what companies want them to do.
Yes. Lobbyists exist. They are bad. Lobbyists are bad because the undermine democracy. Democracy is not bad because of lobbyists.
> But if it's most reasonable economically, for a company to pay someone to dump their taxic waste into the sea, that doesn't mean it is morally OK to do so.
True, but what are you getting at? It has happened and it does happen. The fact that it isn't morally OK doesn't change the facts on the ground. It's like the bicyclist complaining that he had the right of way vs. a car that hits him.
Oh, I thought it was obvious. Much in the same way we disincentivize waste dumping, or bad drivers, we can disincentivize working for totalitarian regimes.
What was the last time Western interventionism brought any good for the world? Who are the US and EU representing to tell other countries how to live their lives??
Right. If the US is representing anybody, it’s Google.
For the Americans who want your government to represent you, you’ve got some work to do. Most Americans I know speak of their government as though it were just some poorly run business that somebody else is responsible for. Get your own house in order before you criticize others peoples’.
The Korean War ended up benefitting South Korea in the sense that they didn’t up like North Korea. The free trade agreements have largely been responsible for large numbers of the world's population improving their living standard. There are other examples of intervention being good. Of course there are lots of examples of intervention being bad.
There is nothing special about Western intervention vs. intervention by other regional powers. Nations with power rarely use it for the well being of the world. But shouldn’t one strive to have governments do what you consider to be right?
>The Korean War ended up benefitting South Korea in the sense that they didn’t up like North Korea
This is an incorrect understanding of Korean history. US anti-communist policy played no small part in creating North Korea in the first place.
In the postwar period, US support for the right-wing dictator Syngman Rhee, who murdered tens of thousands of Korean citizens he suspected were his political opponents, empowered and drew popular support to Kim Il-Sung. Sung was further bolstered by the US giving favored status to Japan over Korea, forcing them, for example, to purchase goods and expertise from their brutal, former colonial rulers. With this state of affairs, Sung, a former anti-Japanese resistance fighter, was successful in persuading many that that the US-backed rule of Rhee was just an extension of the pre-War colonial rule, ultimately devolving into the never-ending civil war we have today.
This in no way benefitted the south, but instead has been a nearly 70 year long drag on their economy, as well as their development into a liberal democracy (which really didn’t happen until a popular revolt in the 80s because the continued US to provide financing and support to authoritarian rulers in the south).
I think it is undeniable that Sung would, with Chinese and Soviet help, would have revolted against anyone who was in power at the time. Regardless of US actions. (The Sino-Soviet split occurred later.) Without US backing Sung would have won and Korea would be much worse off now. At least as I see things.
>Who are the US and EU representing to tell other countries how to live their lives??
Chinese companies have much more freedom when conducting business in America and EU than American and EU companies do in China. It is perfectly acceptable for America and EU to stand-up to China on this point.
>What was the last time Western interventionism brought any good for the world?
You're kidding right? WW2, Korean War, Kosovo. Harder is to prove all the wars that never happened because of American enforced good behaviour (without a strong superpower at the helm, you think there wouldn't be full-scale regional wars all over the globe? What would stop some regional tinpot dictator from invading their neighbour).
And then of course, the growth of democracy itself. Do you think it's a coincidence that America's reign as the most powerful and prosperous nation just so happen to coincide with the global growth of democracies? I mean, when there were two superpowers, a market-based democracy and a communist oligarchy, the world largely divided themselves along those systems of government and economics. Before WW2, even Europe wasn't really the democratic heaven it is now, as many of its constituent nations were either fascist or communist dictatorships.
> It's not fair to expect a technology company to fight a major world economic power. This is a failure of US and EU governments.
Okay, so if the US and EU governments would announce tomorrow that they will start a trade war with China and stop US/EU companies from trading with China unless China immediately stops all censorship/human rights abuses, would Google/other tech companies go along with that, or will they lobby against that move?
The tech companies are not as innocent or blameless as you portray them to be.
That's right, if by 'fight' you mean following rules laid out in countries that it operates in. If the rules are completely skewed against them (and other foreign companies) as they are in China, they have no recourse other than to appeal to their government to lobby on their behalf.
Facebook is in a similar position with respect to Russian interference. The narrative pushed by people like Kara Swisher of Recode is that Facebook should have fought a major world power with limitless resources for cyber attacks and because they didn't they are responsible for the damage, instead of demanding to know why the previous and present American administrations allowed an American company and public be harassed by a belligerent foreign power.
>Google can simply choose not to partner with repressive regimes in enabling and legitimizing censorship and mass surveillance.
And you can choose not to buy Chinese-made products and thereby no longer support and legitimize a repressive regime ... but hey, here we are.
> following rules laid out in countries that it operates in
Exactly my point. Google can choose not to operate in countries where the rules are too egregiously antithetical to their mission.
> Facebook should have fought a major world power
Facebook is responsible for the damage because Facebook built the tools that enabled bad actors to hack democracies and Facebook profited from it (in the short term).
Google is in a similar position. Should they build the tools that enable systematic repression and profit from it?
Sure, they can claim they're "only following orders" but when has that ever worked out well?
>Google can choose not to operate in countries where the rules are too egregiously antithetical to their mission.
I'm all about fairness. Right now, Chinese companies have way more freedom in how they operate in West, than Western companies have in China. All I argued is that is fair for Western governments to put pressure and stand-up for fairness.
>Facebook is responsible for the damage because Facebook built the tools that enabled bad actors to hack democracies and Facebook profited from it (in the short term)
Yeah. They really dropped the ball on that one eh .. how could they have not foreseen being targeted by a major world power with limitless military, cyber and espionage resources. Are you nuts? Tech companies building photo-sharing social networks for grandma should not be left to deal with blatant attacks from belligerent world powers. Defense is the primary function of the nation state, not Facebook!
>ure, they can claim they're "only following orders" but when has that ever worked out well?
The very notion of independent sovereignty of nations means that you can't and shouldn't expect to normalize behavior between countries.
If doing business in the USA is free & good, many outsider businesses will do business there as well. If doing business in China is not all free & good, outsider business won't do business there. How much that hurts foreign businesses vs hurts China is up for debate. But governments individually rule what goes on in their borders, and use those rules both for internal ideological pursuit as well as to attract or detract external interest, as is their role.
"Fairness" of doing business isn't exactly extreme human rights violations or anything. (Other behaviors are, but not this particular point you're making.)
Absolutely there are lines companies should not cross but that's what we have laws and policy for.
That's why we have GDPR/AML/Anti-Bribery/Anti-Corruption legislation.
We all know they are wrong but we still have laws even if some of practices are accepted locally, small bribes etc.
Contrived example, if a printing company wanted to expand into China they would not be allowed print anti Chinese government documents.
Would we be as up in arms about this or should there be a law saying that until China increases human rightsn EU/US companies can't work there and Chinese companies can't work/sell to EU/US?
Obviously this won't/can't happen given our dependence on cheap Chinese manufacturing and our need for year on year growth.
So if it's not illegal, in your book, a company should just do it?
Let's say Saudi Arabia approaches Facebook and wants access to profile and location data to help round up all the gay people in the country to be executed. Maybe they even offer to pay a lot of money, so it'll be profitable.
I have absolutely no faith at all that any large company can really stick to some moral compass. Eventually money corrupts all. Any individual morality and sense of responsibility gets diluted to the point where it disappears completely.
I mean, let's take your reasoning to its logical conclusion: I think most would agree that not paying taxes isn't very ethical, does it mean that we shouldn't have any laws and regulations and controlling bodies surrounding these topics because it's a line "a tech company shouldn't cross"?
If you don't put a cop on the line and there's money on the other side I can assure you that it will be crossed. Raising outrage at the company is not an effective way to enforce the law (although it can work at times).
I see what you mean but I sort of disagree, the problem with outrage-based policing is that it's extremely variable and in this day of social medial it's also very easy to manipulate and instrumentalize. In particular outrage works well for punctual, symbolic acts, not for long trends. See basically anything regarding the alt-right.
I'm not saying that you shouldn't be outraged and voice it, I'm saying that for something as large and intricate as our economical and political relashionship with China you can't really expect it to achieve much. The consequences of outrage should be to change laws and regulations to make sure that it never happens again, not Google saying "oh sorry, I won't do it (this time)".
eh.... I think I agree in principle with you, BUT something doesn't sit quite right. I'm currently in China (hence the throwaway account) and I think any level of collaboration with their government on restricting access to free information for the Chinese people should ABSOLUTELY BE CHALLENGED. Not doing so prolongs their government's ability to not reform vs getting caught in middle-income trap from lack of 0 to 1 innovation.
>I think any level of collaboration with their government on restricting access to free information for the Chinese people should ABSOLUTELY BE CHALLENGED
I don't think that's the parent point, it's more that if you do consider that doing business with the Chinese state is unethical then it makes more sense to push for regulation rather than expect big multinational companies to Do The Right Thing. Right now it seems that we're in a race to the bottom and the Chinese government is making the rules.
> it makes more sense to push for regulation rather than expect big multinational companies to Do The Right Thing
How does it make more sense?
You can't influence foreign policy of your government and you won't find a party with such specific topics which is also powerful enough to actually accomplish something.
With a company like google you can create a shitstorm that will cost them. You can break a companies reputation with a hand full influencers those days.
PS. a company is not a robot (we'd even expect ethics from them). It consists of humans and we should expect acting ethical from a human. They don't get a license to kill the moment they enter their office.
This is the key comment for me. A person in China has an opinion that does not agree with the government and feels so threatened voicing an opinion that would't merit a second thought in the EU/US that they have to go anonymous.
How can we be comfortable with google or any company going to China and effectively saying yup, thats ok.
Almost all countries require compliance with some level of government mandated censorship. Why is China being singled out? Many western and middle eastern countries that tech companies operate in today have severe censorship and monitoring requirements. Some of these countries with have similar or worse human rights records. You hear very little if any uproar about it.
> Almost all countries require compliance with some level of government mandated censorship. Why is China being singled out?
Because the purpose and intent of the censorship matters. China's censorship is about suppressing dissent against a human-rights violating authoritarian regime. Western censorship is about suppressing harmful crimes like child abuse and sometimes intellectual property violations. Those goals are not comparable.
Also, China is massively powerful and influential. Many of the countries with similarly strict censorship regimes are so small and weak that they'll never attract the same kind of attention.
> Why should there be a different standard for Google and other tech companies to not expand into China. If we have a problem with how their government works policy should be applied that prevents/manages how businesses subject to our laws operate abroad.
- Most people care a lot how corporations behave. Many corporations have a very, very bad reputation and it affects their business. E.G: I know more than one person who deleted their facebook.
- Google got its popularity by indicating it was not a standard corporation ("Don't be evil" and acting on it). Google is free to sell that away, but if it does it loses a hard-to-quantify place in our idealistic hearts.
- Maybe you're right, maybe we should hold other tech companies to a higher standard too.
- The US Gov has no effective means to change the structure of China's government. It also cares more about trade and stability than the freedom of China's population.
It sounds like you might be missing a few things. Private companies are, by definition, private entities responsible for prioritizing whatever and however they choose.
If you want to have input in a powerful entity, I really recommend starting a government. If you have an old one layout around, maybe dust if off and use that, but it’ll probably take some work.
I don’t know where you live, but in the US, there’s a bunch of people who are interested in reviving their government entity. They can’t do it alone, though. Here’s the website:
I as a private individual take responsibility for what companies I do business with, and what those companies do. A company claiming an imperative to stockholders does not excuse me, by my own personal moral standard, from investing in such a company.
Also, I'm sure a number of google employees, and the population in general feel this way. When their engineers have to answer for building the mental handcuffs for China, it may not quite be the bragging right it once was.
Private companies are ultimately run by people. People who make moral and ethical decisions every day.
Using a private company to earn an income and then saying "I can't do anything about [bad thing company is doing], companies are by their nature amoral profit chasing beasts" is moral cowardice.
If you work for or with that evil entity, you can do something about it. That it would impact your comfortable lifestyle is not really relevant to the moral calculus.
The only thing that will make things better is many people individually doing the right thing.
> The regulations in China are immoral. Obeying immoral laws is also immoral.
The real world isn't black & white like that. By operating in China, Google isn't making _less_ information available to the average Chinese internet user, since Baidu, Bing etc are already censored anyway. If anything, it will likely be a net win in terms of access to information and user experience as we'd finally see some meaningful competition to Baidu.
The "do no evil" bit might have been endearing to some geeks, but Google won on search quality. I only see sporadic support for something like Duck Duck Go which markets itself as the privacy conscious alternative
In USA, they obey the copyright laws (often described as draconian, with major companies getting copyright extensions again and again, e.g. Disney) and allow DMCA to suppress this information.
Wrong. If China becomes a big business unit for Google then China can use that leverage to start influencing Google’s international operations. We already see China doing this with other companies.
>Why should there be a different standard for Google and other tech companies to not expand into China
there is no different standard. it is unethical to aid totalitarian states in their oppression of their people.
that standard is crystal clear, and google is on the wrong side of it.
waffling regarding corporate responsibility is irrelevant because the question of whether the actor is a corporation or not has nothing to do with the standard itself. once again: the moral issue is very clear on what is acceptable and what is not acceptable.
selling widgets to the chinese is not in violation of that standard. offering a product that is neutered so as to be a tool of oppression is in clear violation of the standard.
the question of china using these tools to oppress their population is not up for debate. china is a police state. for ethnic minorities like the uighurs, the falun gong, the chinese muslims, etc, that police state is operationalized to eradicate and prevent any presence in society.
this is not right. it is not right to help the chinese state keep groups of people subjugated and starving.
the apologists should be ashamed. google should be ashamed. google employees should be ashamed, and outraged.
> Why should there be a different standard for Google
Because Google "is not a conventional company" [1].
A tired trope on HN is that corporations cannot and should not be ethical entities. They are legally mandated to maximize shareholder value, and this usually requires taking actions that people find morally repugnant.
This is a myth and it is horseshit.
Google's mission is to "organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful" [2]. Larry and Sergey knew that realizing its mission requires a long-term focus and a moral center that is unusual for modern corporations.
The public must trust Google to do the right thing even when it's not in Google's short-term interest.
Organic search results skewed by ad payments or censorship is antithetical to Google's mission.
Of course they could make huge short-term profits by compromising the quality and completeness of information, but they've wisely fought against this from the beginning.
This is a rational strategy to maximize the long-term value of the company, and it's worked incredibly well [3].
From an outsider perspective who does not know much about what has or is going on at Google, I was always under the impression that Sergey was the main "don't be evil" guy.
Could this development be a sign that some of the power of the founders is diminishing within Google and has transferred to e.g. major shareholders?
Maybe I worded it badly, I meant why should manufacturing companies be allowed into china with no fanfare but google be ostracized for doing the same.
If what they are doing is legal so be it, what we want to be legal is the real question.
Should we be doing business with countries that don't have the same beliefs that we do?
The other side is that encouraging companies like google into China could help in the long run.
"When we work on making our devices accessible by the blind," he said, "I don't consider the bloody ROI." He said that the same thing about environmental issues, worker safety, and other areas where Apple is a leader.
He didn't stop there, however, as he looked directly at the NCPPR representative and said,
"If you want me to do things only for ROI reasons, you should get out of this stock."
(of course, Apple does do business in China and practices app censorship there, so...)
How does refraining from providing any search access whatsoever to a country with a population of 1.4 billion fit the mission of "organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful?"
One would assume it implies offering services to people in China is a goal. Perhaps "do the right thing" is open to interpretation.
> Organic search results skewed by ad payments or censorship is antithetical to Google's mission.
Has Google's policy of blocking images of pedophilia from search results in countries where the laws and morals of the country forbid those images compromised its mission? Or is there room in the mission for the nuance that different people have different common standards?
Because it will degrade democracy in countries like India. They will implement this censored version in a jiff. Government rules and laws can always change, this project means they will never change towards the better and not allow people to rake in the freedom that democracy implements. This project is certain to weaken democracy all around.
That US excetioptonalism should be put into bed, better for good. With all that happens in US, why would any American companies would assume they still have a moral high ground to demand things?
> The majority of people don't really care how corporations behave.
This is not true, people care, but not enough to make them stay away from Google. Violating privacy is not that high on most people's mind. If we knew, for example, that Google search engine uses child slave labour, a lot of people would stay away from it. But if it's just remembers what you searched for, most people kinda care, but not enough to inconvenience themselves by using something else. It's not binary, it's a spectrum. And new developments move people's opinions along this spectrum.
Exactly - Microsoft (Bing, Office 365, Hotmail, OneDrive etc) has been operating in China forever, and Bing cooperates with state censorship just as you'd expect. But the minute Google does the same thing, everyone loses their minds.
Is this because of expectations (i.e. no one expected MS to hold the moral high ground, but Google was famous for its "Do no evil" mantra)? In which case, well, maybe Google's branding backfired in this case :-/
1. the hyper-moralising over google's business decisions, they're not the only company that modifies its business to access the chinese market nor is the chinese government the only one that demands censorship.
2. google employees' attempts to sabotage the company's business prospects.
1. It is because we/I expect better from Google. Google has such a huge responsibility, being the gateway to the world's information, and we trust them with that position. For-profit and deliberate blocking access to information erodes that trust. I would not care about other companies doing this, but seeing I care about Google doing this shows me that Google has a great PR/goodwill they've build up over the years. With this move I am left wondering if that is deserved, or if it was merely manipulating me for fanboy profit.
2. I think that is because they love working there, they hold their employer to a very high standard, and they don't want to take a pay cut to work for another (perhaps US-only) company with morals more aligned to theirs.
Doing (or even thinking about) ethical business, puts you at a disadvantage over those that care more about profit and increasing their power. Losing prospective profits by doing the right thing is not a popular choice for a commercial business, so the incentives are there to just sell out your soul and go along with censorship (or spying on your users). For Facebook, this went on for years, until they found themselves in a mess. This mess was the result of 1000s of decisions made by all employees (not just upper management). I commend Google's employees for standing up for their beliefs and vision for the company. Only in a very Ayn Rand world is this sabotage. I am sure the big chief in charge of foreign markets views it as sabotage, but luckily Google is not run by only Eric Schmidt's.
Agree with all your points. I am wondering what justification Sergey,Larry will give for this. If they took good ethical decisions, they would gain more respect from people. I read the book The Google Guys when I was 13 (now 20). Larry,Sergey were the first 2 people i sorta idolized. Been a Google fanboy mainly due to their incredibe R&D,STEM focus. Now, i feel sad. Obviously, not gonna defend bad actions but it's difficult to overcome that bias,fanboyism cultivated over the years.
I also wonder why Larry,Sergey are so out of action. They should have at least been more public till they're about 50 years old.
Weird thought: maybe somehow Google will help overthrow the communist govt in China in the future.
The fact that this news makes so many people sad is evidence of the fact that we expect better from Google.
Having a whiff of human decency is not hyper-moralising, it's really just having a whiff of human decency.
> google employees' attempts to sabotage the company's business prospects.
So having concerns about people getting killed for their opinions and whatnot is "hyper-moralising", but having concerns about "backstabbing" your employer isn't. Gotcha.
And it's not even backstabbing. When a friend of yours has a really horrible idea -- and that is putting it hyper-mildly in this context -- you are being more of a friend to them when you try to stop them.
It is because Google put that hyper moralising hat on itself.
In their hay days, they crafted that hippy/liberal/sensible young alpha image to win customer approval, reducing government regulation and eat market shares against those faceless corporates.
Now they are the new baddies in town, the image no longer does them any good. They will retire it by then and be a normal company.
3. Western people feeling outraged in place of people from other countries.
I would love to hear from more native Chinese people, but from what I've seen so far, most of them would much rather have access to limited services than nothing at all. Not being able to make Duo calls, access Play Store, access AppEngine, access Youtube, etc is far more of an issue to them than not being able to Google about tiananmen square.
Yeah it's strange how nobody talks about the fact that google search is getting less and less relevant and more and more filled with garbage every year. It's downright terrible, I have to go to social media or search with lots of domain operators (if I can remember them) to actually find what I'm looking for.
I'm sure google's "analytics" say they are doing great and results are more relevant and engaging for them and their corporate partners than ever, but I am often walking away from a search not finding what I know still exists on the web. They are just a massive media conglomerate trying to promote other massive media orgs and their content, content that doesn't live in that bubble is increasingly out of bounds.
It's funny you say that. DDG, 2 years ago, was hard for me to use (less relevant). The last 3 months especially, they are about the same. I have a limited search set though...mostly .NET code searches.
I personally find that for a lot of queries, especially ones of the "trivial" or "smart" kind where I'm looking for some old meme or bit of fandom trivia, DDG often returns results that are noticeably worse. Not much worse, and not always - but often enough that if I don't find something on DDG, I frequently try the same search on Google anyway.
That said, DDG isn't that much worse than Google in terms of search quality, and is perfectly fine for more "serious" queries - It's an inferior user experience, admittedly, but I'm willing to drink RC Cola instead of drinking cane-sugar old-recipe Coke that also is contaminated with lead.
I always try DuckDuckGo first, and if I have trouble, then I fall back to Google. It doesn't cost me much, and I figure if I just default to Google then I'm endorsing a stagnant search market. It's better to support competitors to give them space to improve.
Each country has its own rules and for sure any company wishing to operate there should abide.
Be from North Korea or Cuba etc and then see if PayPal opens an account for you. I don't see PayPal fights for it, they simply abide the law and move on.
You have a company and the gov gives you tons of regulations that most of them are unfair? Your problem, take it or leave it.
You cannot open in NK because it has a trade block imposed by the US. Something similar was happening with Cuba or Iran. Let me tell you that abiding and legitimating freedom opressing regimes is not very american, even if it is for money.
If you have examples where America puts money before the freedom of the individual to have a political opinion, then it's those examples that need to change, not our standard of America.
Nailed. I tried to convey both things. First how America is blocking some countries for political reasons linked with democracy and liberty. On the other side of the spectrum there is the need to trade with some shady regimes. This is the side in which America needs to be more firm. Regarding China, we should not celebrate that an American company legitimates this censorship. Moreso (more-so?) when the company itself made billions on top of a technology designed for sharing information in an open way.
From a business standpoint, I think it's only stupid for Google not to revisit such a huge market, then I wonder if they really have other choices that make business sense?
Seeing how launching "a limited Chinese lite version" went for many many many Western companies in China, I can tell following:
Communists are totally ok with these limited versions, they are more than eager to "lure in" foreign dotcoms. Their logic is: "let them grow business in China, when the time comes, their business in China becomes so big, that it can be held hostage, we can demand them anything"
Look at AirBnB:
They were swearing on the graves of their fathers that you ID verification data is gone the moment it is verified, .... yet you will be super surprised to see that if you book a place in China, ALL YOUR ID DATA will be automatically filed into the form that hotels have to send to Chinese ministry of interior.
I use a lot of Google service everyday as I'm sure many people do, if i don't have to worry about having to find vpn that works than yeah it will be helpful.
I rarely need to look for those censored stuff anyway even in the US.
Why do the 1.4 billion people living there put up with it in the first place? Why they have just made Jinping a lifetime president? Why are they fine with their own Chinese tech companies doing this already?
It would help to understand the geopolitical causes of this environment instead of the constant faux outrage over Google doing what any business does, which is provide services in accordance to the laws where they operate.
I do not want a world where a few major US tech companies become political powers. This effort should be directed towards the government forces where it matters.
> There's no way out. You will be held responsible for what you do and what you don't do.
And that's fair actually. After all, with great power comes great responsibility. (At least in strict utilitarian sense action, non-action, private-public policies and so on are undoubtedly very much fall under the same consideration. That is, is it possible for the big company to do something? To maximize its utility function? If yes, then they should, right? Now it's up to the people to keep that function useful for them.)
> I do not want a world where a few major US tech companies become political powers.
They already are political powers because they are major companies. Tech and US doesn't really matter here. Google is among the biggest companies of the world. (Alphabet is currently 3rd on whatever 2018 list I just found.)
When a company this big moves results in a lot of currents shifting, and that means economies can change. And that's very much political. (Especially when it means cross-border business, and imported/exported competition and so on.)
> Why do the 1.4 billion people living there put up with it in the first place?
I have a close friend who's a member of the communist party, but we speak about these things frankly. This is my own opinion after talking with them
0. There was an uprising in 1989, and the people who protested were mown down with machineguns
1. The generation afterwards are conditioned to tie the communist party with China's new prosperity. Ie, the wealth you enjoy has only been possible thanks to the leadership of the communist party.
2. The people have no concept of how/why they would rule. It's a job for someone else. Setting the laws is viewed as a thing for experts, and if you wanted to set the law you'd join the communist party.
I've seen these same sentiments expressed by many in and from China. They enjoy what they have and do not have the same interest in democratic practice as the West, for better or worse.
That's why I question what the outrage is all about, when the very people living there have already made their choice.
Because people living in PRC are people and deserve the right to govern themselves.
Hell, the principle that the people are the rightful rulers is part of the PRC's name.
The people living there include those on May 35th that died for the freedom to choose who they vote for, as well as those in Hong Kong who are still frequently kidnapped.
You seem to be ignoring his first bullet point about being mowed down by machine guns, which is somewhat at odds with they “enjoy what they have” and do not have the same interest in democracy.
I disagree, facts do exist, the truth has always been a valuable asset for the ones who knows it. This is what most modern journalists or glorified bloggers don't get.
China is emerging a country with a massive amount of people, while providing relative increase in standard of living and creating opportunity for large swaths of people. China has had a large uneducated population for a long time. They are doing it using a system that has often been shunned or ostracized. Western nations have historically done everything in their power, directly and indirectly to subvert alternative systems taking root. To me China makes sense: Keep the people focused. Create a modern resilient communist social structure that will stand globalization. As much as possible, keep the west and western influences out during incubation.
1) it's part of the social contract. freedom of speech is relatively new phenomena, and the history of the US has shown both the upsides and downsides of that right. standing in a town square and criticizing the king/emperor/lord would have gotten you imprisoned or killed for most of human history, from the times of the Roman emperors to the monarchies of more recent times. modern chinese trade certain rights that many in the West would consider "unalienable" for the efficiency of a tightly ruled authoritarian government that has been seen as instrumental in bringing two decades of unprecedented growth / lifting 500M people out of poverty.
2) the very fact that china has 1.4B makes the existence of an authoritarian government much more easier to understand. without defending the actions of the PRC, from a purely utilitarian standpoint censorship and state control of the media allows for greater social cohesion and the avoidance of ideas and movements that can spread and cause mass hysteria. china is very aware of its own history of such movements and the havoc they've created (the Taiping Rebellion for a great example).
it is common for people to genuinely not care about the freedoms they are denied.
for instance, there is likely a law on the books in the USA which prohibits you from having your cattle graze on various lands. you would be incrementally more free if there was not that law, but do you care? no, the issue is not relevant to your life, nor is it relevant to any life you could imagine yourself realistically having from the starting point of the present moment. if you were a cattle farmer the issue would be more salient -- but there's still no guarantee that you would be railing against the law.
now, imagine that the prospect of democracy was what was forbidden, as it is in china. it's abstract, and the benefits are purely hypothetical for the chinese -- but there are hypothetical liabilities that come with democracy too, which might seem just as salient if you don't start from a position of being in favor of democracy.
"Why do the 1.4 billion people living there put up with it in the first place? Why they have just made Jinping a lifetime president? Why are they fine with their own Chinese tech companies doing this already?"
China is not a democracy, that's why. This should not be a shocking revelation. It is also easy to forget that there was a civil war in China after the Japanese withdrawal, and the American-backed Republic of China lost (they retreated to Taiwan; this is why such a small island is such a big deal to China). That was when the choice was made, and the Chinese people have not had a choice since then.
"It would help to understand the geopolitical causes of this environment"
Have you been living under a rock? China has one of the best-documented systems of censorship and propaganda, operated at the largest scale in human history. The Internet has greatly aided both of those efforts -- the great firewall for censorship, the 50-cent army for propaganda.
This has been explored ad nauseum, and there has been plenty of news about how the Chinese have refined and developed their various methods.
Wait really?!? I'd love to see a link to that, so China has more knowledge about how the services that control everyone's digital lives function then we do in America. While I see the totalitarian effect that can have the lack of knowledge and trust in these brands is slowly turning me away especially since alternatives exist.
And?.. Many companies "submit" all their source code to anyone interested, regardless of doing business in China. Just saying. Among closed-source ones, Microsoft and many others have decades-long history of submitting the code for governments to review. Does it really matter for anything?
Or you mean even the code which doesn't leave company servers? Do you have a source then, because I'd have a hard time believing that.
That seems not believable at all i'd like to see source for that, i find hard to believe Apple, Oracle and such companies that are very protective for their code to submitted to one of most copy past countries in the world.
I've heard about this in the form of "if you want to sell hardware, you have to give them the blueprints", and companies doing it because they want to do business there.
I wouldn't be surprised if this included the source code of everything that ships with the device, but I'd think it doesn't extend to server-side code.
> That seems not believable at all i'd like to see source for that, i find hard to believe Apple, Oracle and such companies that are very protective for their code to submitted to one of most copy past countries in the world.
The actual implementation is important here. Does the Chinese government require the companies send them a tarball or just the opportunity to inspect it on the companies terms?
If it's the latter, I can see all kind of companies complying. It's not unheard of to allow code inspection and auditing by setting up a secure PC with the code with all the USB ports epoxied shut and no network connection. The inspector using it can read and take notes, but the notes have to be reviewed and cleared by the company before they can be taken away.
People who are neck deep in the surveillance economy and have long sold out can't suddenly pretend to care about ethics without looking insincere.
Given the large majority seem to have no problem with Google, Facebook and others, and their ability to attract employees is unaffected it's obvious ethics is not a high priority for current or prospective employees, if anything the fawning is often cringy.
That also explains why inspite of Snowden's revelations no one really cares and there is no change. So there is little basis for ethical concern about China, unless the motive is purely posturing and grandstanding.
I can wholeheartedly endorse them. One other benefit is that they actually have real live humans doing customer support. I haven't needed it much (only when I was setting up my custom domain and feature requests), but it's very reassuring to know it's there.
It was the stories of people who were permanently locked out of their gmail accounts with no recourse and no one to call that ultimately caused me to abandon Google.
There are lots of tech companies active in countries like China, Russia, Iran, and other countries with varying ideas about privacy, human rights, etc. This generally requires complying with local legislation, whether you agree with that or not.
Singling out Google for not opting to exclude a fifth of the population of this planet from their products is a bit overkill. I'd rather they offer choice to the Chinese people on their terms than opting to not be in China at all. Google has huge stakes in China with Android, related production of many Android devices, and a lot of their other products. I imagine pulling out of China is not very practical for them at this point nor is selling phones without Google search.
When I was still working on search Nokia Maps (now Here maps) we had to comply with all sorts of rules internationally, including for China. In addition to being weird about certain POIs (e.g. Tien an mien square) we also had to deal with their obfuscated GPS coordinates. They use some weird shifting algorithm that you have to license from them. The point is not the algorithm (you can find it online if you dig hard enough) but the fact that you had to talk to them to get a license. It's a control point for them.
Another weird thing was that Iran insisted on referring to the Gulf as the Persian Gulf. One nice edge case there is the inflight maps of planes flying over their territory.
The point here is that doing business internationally is hard and taking the moral high ground basically means not doing business with a lot of countries.
How precisely does the fact that these countries exist 'require' complying with local legislation? Google is free to host their servers in other countries, which are free from censorship laws. It's not like Google needs to be present in that market to survive.
In a bigger context, the Internet business, and Google in particular, is a product of a free, liberal society. It couldn't have existed without freedom. Thus freedom is linked with success. So, as long as Google is innovative, it has that inherent advantage over its Chinese competitors.
Are you sure the Internet is a product of a free and liberal society? It may just be coincidence; America happened to be the largest economy on Earth when the Internet was developed.
I would argue that the basic design of the Internet is the most efficient way to build a large-scale, general-purpose computer network; this is why it has subsumed or is in the process of subsuming every other system. Had China been the world's largest economy at the time I think they would have developed the Internet too -- maybe they would have tried to build some kind of censorship in, but they would have quickly discovered that it is just more efficient to censor at the edges (I think they are already aware of this fact, given the amount of censorship they require from social media websites and the last-resort role the Great Firewall plays; there is also the general tolerance of businesses using VPNs to avoid the Great Firewall).
For what it's worth, there is innovation coming out of China, and it is happening at an increasing pace as the Chinese economy grows. The freedom to criticize your government or to organize a protest movement is not really necessary for technical innovation.
Is it a coincidence that USA was the largest economy on Earth? I don't think so. On the contrary, I think it became the most powerful country on Earth due to the free competition of talent and ideas, which is impossible without free speech.
Besides, Internet, being as wide open to anonymity as it is, simply never would never have been developed in a country like China, it would be deemed too dangerous. They may compete these days in electronics, but it doesn't mean they can compete in everything. Totalitarian society is always rotten in one way or another, and it manifests in all its output, including business, science, technology and culture. I'm saying this as a person born in the USSR.
Keep in mind that in 1776 when the Continental Congress declared independence, Britain was the largest economy in the world. America's declaration of independence lists out all the abuse of power and lack of freedom people endured under British rule. Despite all that, Britain had become the wealthiest country in human history at the time, commanding the most cutting-edge technology (the USA copied steam engines from the British) and having the most extensive system of trade to have ever existed up to then.
Sure, a measure of freedom is necessary to allow an economy to grow, but not nearly as much freedom as people enjoy in the USA. China is a case-in-point: their economy has rapidly expanded as the communist party has started to understand how far a bit of economic freedom goes. For all the freedoms people have in Japan, China managed to unseat Japan as the world's second-largest economy, and is on track to become the world's largest economy within our lifetimes.
China is not the USSR. China has embraced certain capitalist approaches -- like capital markets. The Chinese have figured out what the USSR never fully grasped: economic freedom is not the same thing as political freedom. The USSR tried to micromanage every aspect of the economy, but the Chinese have figured out that it is good enough to have a party member seated on the board of directors.
Right now it seems China's success is only temporary, owing a lot to undervaluation of its currency and to the low cost of labor. It cannot stay in this place forever - sooner or later the growth will stop, the cost of labor will go up, and that's when all the totalitarian warts, such as their weak justice system, corruption and ineffective management, will become obvious.
The US became the largest economy on Earth because it had 1700's era technology with which which to settle a colossal landmass rich in natural resources and with no real enemies to contend with, plus all the immigrants from all over the world to help make it a reality.
The US started a game of Civilization on easy mode.
Actually, it had colonial powers to contend with, but more importantly, internal factions. The fact that instead of disintegrating into multiple warring entities, it united and grew to become the powerful USA, speaks volumes to the strength of its foundation.
Incidentally, this is precisely where your Civilization analogy goes wrong: the real newly formed states have way more powerful centrifugal factors than those embedded into mechanics of the game.
> I'd rather they offer choice to the Chinese people on their terms than opting to not be in China at all.
Very much agreed. And I'd add that by offering that choice they're making Chinese internet users strictly better off, rather than worse off. By operating in China, Google isn't making any _less_ information available to Chinese internet users, since Baidu, Bing etc are already censored anyway. If anything, it will likely be a net win in terms of access to information and user experience as we'd finally see some meaningful competition to Baidu.
435 comments
[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 194 ms ] threadFor context, Xi Jinping's feelings get hurt when people point out that he physically resembles Winnie the Pooh [1].
[1] https://www.theverge.com/2017/7/18/15993136/winnie-the-pooh-...
I am not saying that right to be forgotten is halfway through from free-speech absolutism to full-blown state control of information, but come on. If you ever jumped from a high place, you know that every foot of height makes a lot of difference.
Antitrust and privacy laws in Europe is going to make a lot of their business less profitable there. Which would lead to new efforts to make up that profit elsewhere. China's essentially an untapped market for Google, so its not a shock for the drive for money to eventually bring them back there.
They will never overtake Baidu, who have leaks of Googles algorithm, more data to train AI on, government support, an existing (better) product in asian languages, and a massive userbase.
Sounds plausible, got any sources on that?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Aurora
https://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/01/new-approach-to-chin...
Google enlisted the help of the NSA after their internal code repository was hacked. (And before the NSA hacked Google for surveillance purposes).
> [...] we detected a highly sophisticated and targeted attack on our corporate infrastructure originating from China that resulted in the theft of intellectual property from Google.
> These attacks and the surveillance they have uncovered--combined with the attempts over the past year to further limit free speech on the web--have led us to conclude that we should review the feasibility of our business operations in China. We have decided we are no longer willing to continue censoring our results on Google.cn, and so over the next few weeks we will be discussing with the Chinese government the basis on which we could operate an unfiltered search engine within the law, if at all. We recognize that this may well mean having to shut down Google.cn, and potentially our offices in China.
https://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/19/technology/19china.html
> Lanxiang, in east China’s Shandong Province, is a huge vocational school that was established with military support and trains some computer scientists for the military. The school’s computer network is operated by a company with close ties to Baidu, the dominant search engine in China and a competitor of Google.
> “I think it’s impossible for our students to hack Google or other U.S. companies because they are just high school graduates and not at an advanced level. [...]
If there is any eastward leakage of Google's code, it's certainly not obvious in day-to-day usage of Baidu's search engine.
Possibly because of the censorship? If so, Google isn't going to be much better.
Anyways, I still think Baidu is pretty garbage and I constantly rely on Bing for inside China searches.
https://abc.xyz/investor/other/google-code-of-conduct.html
https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/ne...
It's worth remembering that "data" as they say stales very quickly. Knowing that you ordered a package two months ago is far less interesting than knowing you're expecting one next week. Or that you'll be booking a plane trip soon, and wouldn't you just love to know Delta is cheapest on that date?
"Having your data" isn't a binary concept. Their services degrade substantially once you turn off the firehose. You'll still get ads, but they won't be tailored to you. Maps won't be able to show your current position. Assistant won't be able to recognize your voice.
And that's fine, if you prefer that approach. But the concept of "having your data" in a historical context is meaningless. The only thing that matters is if that firehose is still available to them.
Turn it off if you like. It isn't a lost cause.
Which it obviously is, so I'm not sure what point you were making viz. Google. The "turning off" of the items you mention is also entirely a user-visualization exercise. All of your data is still there inside the panopticon. Even not using Google service anywhere does not free you from it, if you send email to a Gmail user, lo, Google has it. So concerns about the behavior of a company with the market presence of Google are very relevant.
Prove it. They offer controls for almost every service they provide. If you're going to claim they're visual-only, then prove that these controls do nothing.
https://myaccount.google.com/activitycontrols
https://adssettings.google.com/
Comparatively less, yes, but knowing about all your packages is still very interesting and hugely privacy sensitive.
> You'll still get ads, but they won't be tailored to you.
TBH, all tailoring I've seen is comically bad. Yeah, they can know I bought shoes so they would show me shoe ads for the next three months. As if that's how humans behave - once we're in "shoe heat", we do nothing but buy shoes for three months and the task of the good ad system is to capture when the "shoe heat" starts and capitalize on it. I think if one wrote a comedy show about robots trying to understand human society and getting it hilariously wrong every time, the behavior of ad networks could supply great material for years.
> But the concept of "having your data" in a historical context is meaningless.
No it's not. There's a lot of private things in one's past than can be dug up and (ab)used. Ask any politician who went through an electoral campaign.
You might be surprised. Some people buy far more shoes than they need. Be it for fashion or simply the love of shopping, I wouldn't be surprised at all if targeting shoe ads at recent shoppers actually made sense.
>No it's not. There's a lot of private things in one's past than can be dug up and (ab)used.
I'm speaking strictly in terms of their business model and services. That's where live data is essential. Fear of potential blackmail seems pretty far removed from that context.
Personally I feel that Google has slowly become more and more censored over the recent years, to the point that I do searches on multiple search engines if I'm not so sure about the Google results.
More than often there's not only a filter-bubble in my results, but there's more and more sites that suddenly disappeared over the years, but are high-ranking on DDG, Bing, Yandex, ... — especially in February / March 2018 there was a kind-of-extreme disappearance of sites in the results where I previously used Google to get to them.
This feels like a very different world than 1998 when G could launch an upstart search engine with 'free the world's information' in their DNA. in 1998 even in the tech bubble people still had no idea how the open web platform would be used. Now it's some combination of closed platform dominance, cookie farms, land grabs and spam.
Not surprising G is under pressure to play ball in china; the prevalence of android there (albeit in weird open forms sans G maps & tools) gives the government a geopolitical interest in tying some strings.
In other news I find it hilarious FBs license was revoked in Hangzhou just now. Suck it. Hahaha.
The majority of people don't really care how corporations behave. If they did Google search/gmail/maps would not be so popular. They have the right price point(0$) for people to ignore any moral misgivings they may have. I'm guilty of this and up to my neck in google services
This exactly.
I would even make a stronger case. It's not fair to expect a technology company to fight a major world economic power. This is a failure of US and EU governments. They should pressure China to liberalize their government and provide a level economic playing field (it is insane what China gets away with with respect to the roadblocks it places on Western companies to do business there).
Israel massacring Palestinians? Hey man, they can do whatever they want, we don't have any right to tell them not to and it doesn't make what they're doing any less wrong!
I don't have the answers but there are hard questions there, not just for our governments but for us as voters.
To believe that China does not attempt to influence other countries is naive. China puts a great deal of pressure on other nations with regard to things like recognition of Taiwan or inviting the Dalai Lama to speak. These have occasionally been in the news over the last few years, e.g. China’s retaliatory measures against Norway for Liu Xiabo winning the Nobel Peace Prize, but in fact they go back decades – when Michelangelo Antonioni was showing his documentary film Chung Kuo around in the early 1970s, in European countries where a screening was organized the local Chinese embassy would raise scandal.
China has repeatedly lobbied, with some success now, for East African nations to adopt its "Great Firewall" network infrastructure.
And for pressuring airlines not to list Taiwan on their websites for booking.
If an American pays a Chinese businessman in China a bribe, that's an FCPA [1] violation. If the U.S. government wanted to prevent American technology companies from helping China's dictator build a modern dystopia, it would have precedent.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_Corrupt_Practices_Act
It's not about saying "stop censoring the internet or we'll nuke you", it's about saying "if you want to do business with us we demand that you meet these standards, otherwise no biggy, we'll just go elsewhere."
And China does attempt to do the same thing, for instance in many African countries. It's less obvious because they're still ramping up their diplomacy, US and EU have a huge headstart there.
Do you have no sense of your own hypocrisy? I am certain you have 0 qualms in using and buying Chinese manufactured products, or buying services and products from companies that operate in China. And yet here we are with you lecturing from your soapbox on who should be or shouldn't be ashamed of their actions. Look to yourself first before moralizing at others.
You have no choice?
>and justifying unethical behavior.
I get it. It's not unethical when you engage in commerce with a regime you find unethical, or when you buy from all the other companies that manufacture their goods in China ... but it's unethical if Google doesn't want to ignore 1.4 billion people?
>The fact that this is the only sentence you've touched speaks for itself.
As opposed to the other three snide and arrogant sentences? If you'd like a good-faith discussion please lead by example.
Who says it's not unethical? Why are you putting words in peoples' mouths?
On one hand you talk about having a good-faith discussion but then you go ahead and base your argument off of words you've put in someone else's mouth.
> but it's unethical if Google doesn't want to ignore 1.4 billion people?
Most people find corruption of data far worse than the absence of data. I'd rather not be told anything than be told a lie.
OK. I guess I made the reasonable assumption that buying Chinese goods or buying goods from companies that do business in Chinese is not intrinsically unethical since it is something is completely pervasive. The fact that neither the public, nor democratic governments, nor any companies have any qualms
So I'm sorry if I stumbled upon a hypocrite who hates himself for engaging in the unethical action of living in a modern globalized society.
>On one hand you talk about having a good-faith discussion
I sure do and still do. You tell me, was OP's first comment a good-faith start to a discussion? If not, why are you hassling me? Because you agree with OP - that's the standard here?
>Most people find corruption of data far worse than the absence of data.
Got stats for that? Or are we projecting how we feel on the rest of the world.
But to rephrase it, do you think Chinese citizens should have the option to use the same products that their peers in other countries do? The actual point I made however had a different focus, mainly - do you think a company who competes with other companies can just ignore a market of 1.4 billion people when none of their other competitors do? Companies go bankrupt all the time. Even a multinational Fortune 100 company will have a life expectancy of 40-50 years. So the entire point was: - No western government hasn't taken steps to isolate this 'unethical' regime. - The public is perfectly fine with travelling to China, buying from China, doing business with companies who do business in China. - All of Google's competitors are in China.
But Google is evil because they only lasted 8 years of their self-imposed exile (and if you remember, their leaving China was precipitated by Chinese hacking attack against their servers).
Turn your mouse around. Where is it made? This is true since it was a joke in the 90s.
> I get it. It's not unethical when you engage in commerce with a regime you find unethical, or when you buy from all the other companies that manufacture their goods in China ... but it's unethical if Google doesn't want to ignore 1.4 billion people?
I never said it's not unethical. You say that I say that. Which is quite weak. I hope this is the result of you realizing what you did and now trying to dig yourself out by shifting blame to others.
A company making toothbrush is different from a company helps censorship.
The point is what a company does, not where it operates.
If you don't want to be banned on HN, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. Those are at https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
China's priority here is totally not to censor them, it is to conduct the "handshaking ritual" and have them becoming subject under China's "law." A "blood pack" - making them partners in crime.
The same was with Yahoo. They came to China talking only about "search," but got asked about "personal data of all China's opposition members residing in US." Not only they gave everything to China, but put extreme effort to cover their "special relationship" with China's ministry of interior.
In this light, please take a look at very, very close relationship Google tried to establish with Russian government in period of 2005-2010. We are talking about nothing less than first person accounts of people involved certifying that Google was sending all kinds of "consultants" to Russian political establishment, training them in online campaigning. Simultaneously, pages of Russian political opposition did disappear in Google's search. In light of recent events, this should be subject to much scrutiny.
P.S. : Additional comment on Google. At some moment they snapped after all. They closed their Russian development centre, and evacuated key personnel to Switzerland in unprecedented visa deal with government of Zurich.
P.P.S. : On person whom Sundar Pichay was meeting. I read name Wang Huning in the article, and instantly I felt that something "clicked." The name was familiar. Wang Huning is the man who is the real propaganda chief in the communist party. To know more of his view of USA, please read his work titled "America against America." I will not be surprised at all if he is the man entrusted with running their stratagems targeting USA.
this is potentially the corruption story of the century
There was a minor intern in Russian presidential administration. Nicknamed "rLode" in the Internets. I happened to knew him as I attended language courses ran by high school he was attending.
He held his home page there "http://rlode.narod.ru/main.html" a man of unconcealed, borderline rabid views on social class. If you ever unearth an archived version of the page, I guarantee you will have some fun time reading it. If you dig further, finding his offline contacts are not hard.
Second was a Far Eastern strongman nicknamed "Twix" or "Nuts," man running arms trade in the Far East. How he came upon the info, I didn't know. Just assume that being a "big man" in Russia involves having lots of ears. I think you still can find him making appearances online on Russian .onion arms sales sites under different Japanese cartoons themed pseudonyms.
As for people of Google's side, ask any man relocated from Moscow to Zurich. Few people I knew there voiced their extreme surprise with their relocation coming unannounced, and being done with near military level of coordination. Officials were an everyday sight in their office on Balchug street. Just the fact that their office was on an island just a river across from Kremlin tells a lot. Nobody pays a ennormous premium to have office in this special place without having "being close to Kremlin" factor in mind.
On Wang, I once read the very few English translation of 半月谈 with some excerpts from his works. I never read the complete book. But the general theme is him telling party members to not to fear the USA as it is a frustrated, insecure, diseased society - something that has not to be feared, but taken advantage of. His main discontent with USA is it spreading that "plague" around the world. Following, it is CCPs role as "a global messiah" (oh my....) to rectify that, showing world "a different vision of a successful state system."
https://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-dont-be-evil/2540...
They're entirely truthful. It's just oddly structured.
They don't make the law, neither should they. It's not Google's job to decide how China runs its country. And offering legitimate users legitimate service is neither immoral nor greedy.
The majority of Chinese people would much rather have a limited set of services than no services at all. They already do live with dozens of censored search engines, so one more makes no difference to them. Google isn't making their life any worse, but rather providing them services they didn't have before. How is that "evil"?
What is with this shaming? OP made a cogent, reasoned point. I don't necessarily agree, but it's not 'shameful'.
Buying tooth brushes or power tools from China may not be ideal, but it is no where near as bad as helping the Chinese goverment oppress its people by contributing to limiting their people's access to information. For a dollar.
Next thing you know, Google might do something really bad, like helping the US Army with some AI research. zOMG!
- American companies stop facilitating totalitarian regimes
- World governments also prompt totalitarian regimes to move towards democracy
In reality, moving to Democracy would result in more radicalization and instability and not less.
Without going into a long rant, there are toxic forces within many countries that would take their country on a profoundly bad route, by any universal standard, if Democracy were forced upon them.
I know what you're saying - there's a lot of instability in the world and sometimes people make very poor choices - but democracy is a way to better handle the turbulence.
In essence, it gives us the ability to handle the coup that occurs every few years in unstable environments with less bloodshed - rather than the military taking control and ousting a leader, and a bunch of people dying or being imprisoned, another party takes over at the ballot box.
The newly elected ruler might be a really bad choice, but it's the people's perjorative to choose their leaders and it's a much better alternative than another coup.
By definition, “companies” are incentivized to prioritize capital pursuit over moral pursuit. It’s actually the most fundamental part of the whole concept.
Many democratic governments in the world, and particularly the most wealthy and powerful ones, are run by people who are (to a large unmeasurable extent) incentivized to do what companies want them to do. This is not a fundamental concept of a democratic government, but as long as the electorate fails to take responsibility for their own government’s behavior, the incentives remain in the company’s favor, which doesn’t make a very good case for democracy.
Democracy is a very slippery concept. America, for example, is well understood to not be a democracy, but it’s people seem to have convinced themselves it is. These kinds of miscalculations are really at the root of “why not”.
Indeed. But if it's most reasonable economically, for a company to pay someone to dump their taxic waste into the sea, that doesn't mean it is morally OK to do so.
> Many democratic governments in the world, and particularly the most wealthy and powerful ones, are run by people who are (to a large unmeasurable extent) incentivized to do so what companies want them to do.
Yes. Lobbyists exist. They are bad. Lobbyists are bad because the undermine democracy. Democracy is not bad because of lobbyists.
True, but what are you getting at? It has happened and it does happen. The fact that it isn't morally OK doesn't change the facts on the ground. It's like the bicyclist complaining that he had the right of way vs. a car that hits him.
What was the last time Western interventionism brought any good for the world? Who are the US and EU representing to tell other countries how to live their lives??
For the Americans who want your government to represent you, you’ve got some work to do. Most Americans I know speak of their government as though it were just some poorly run business that somebody else is responsible for. Get your own house in order before you criticize others peoples’.
There is nothing special about Western intervention vs. intervention by other regional powers. Nations with power rarely use it for the well being of the world. But shouldn’t one strive to have governments do what you consider to be right?
This is an incorrect understanding of Korean history. US anti-communist policy played no small part in creating North Korea in the first place.
In the postwar period, US support for the right-wing dictator Syngman Rhee, who murdered tens of thousands of Korean citizens he suspected were his political opponents, empowered and drew popular support to Kim Il-Sung. Sung was further bolstered by the US giving favored status to Japan over Korea, forcing them, for example, to purchase goods and expertise from their brutal, former colonial rulers. With this state of affairs, Sung, a former anti-Japanese resistance fighter, was successful in persuading many that that the US-backed rule of Rhee was just an extension of the pre-War colonial rule, ultimately devolving into the never-ending civil war we have today.
This in no way benefitted the south, but instead has been a nearly 70 year long drag on their economy, as well as their development into a liberal democracy (which really didn’t happen until a popular revolt in the 80s because the continued US to provide financing and support to authoritarian rulers in the south).
WWI, WWII, Gulf War (1990), Kosovo (1999)?
Chinese companies have much more freedom when conducting business in America and EU than American and EU companies do in China. It is perfectly acceptable for America and EU to stand-up to China on this point.
>What was the last time Western interventionism brought any good for the world?
You're kidding right? WW2, Korean War, Kosovo. Harder is to prove all the wars that never happened because of American enforced good behaviour (without a strong superpower at the helm, you think there wouldn't be full-scale regional wars all over the globe? What would stop some regional tinpot dictator from invading their neighbour).
And then of course, the growth of democracy itself. Do you think it's a coincidence that America's reign as the most powerful and prosperous nation just so happen to coincide with the global growth of democracies? I mean, when there were two superpowers, a market-based democracy and a communist oligarchy, the world largely divided themselves along those systems of government and economics. Before WW2, even Europe wasn't really the democratic heaven it is now, as many of its constituent nations were either fascist or communist dictatorships.
https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2014/10/the-us-...
Okay, so if the US and EU governments would announce tomorrow that they will start a trade war with China and stop US/EU companies from trading with China unless China immediately stops all censorship/human rights abuses, would Google/other tech companies go along with that, or will they lobby against that move?
The tech companies are not as innocent or blameless as you portray them to be.
Google fights major world powers every day [1, 2].
And Google doesn't have to fight to force the Chinese government to stop censoring their citizens.
Google can simply choose not to partner with repressive regimes in enabling and legitimizing censorship and mass surveillance.
[1] https://transparencyreport.google.com/user-data/overview
[2] https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/technology/google-en...
That's right, if by 'fight' you mean following rules laid out in countries that it operates in. If the rules are completely skewed against them (and other foreign companies) as they are in China, they have no recourse other than to appeal to their government to lobby on their behalf.
Facebook is in a similar position with respect to Russian interference. The narrative pushed by people like Kara Swisher of Recode is that Facebook should have fought a major world power with limitless resources for cyber attacks and because they didn't they are responsible for the damage, instead of demanding to know why the previous and present American administrations allowed an American company and public be harassed by a belligerent foreign power.
>Google can simply choose not to partner with repressive regimes in enabling and legitimizing censorship and mass surveillance.
And you can choose not to buy Chinese-made products and thereby no longer support and legitimize a repressive regime ... but hey, here we are.
Exactly my point. Google can choose not to operate in countries where the rules are too egregiously antithetical to their mission.
> Facebook should have fought a major world power
Facebook is responsible for the damage because Facebook built the tools that enabled bad actors to hack democracies and Facebook profited from it (in the short term).
Google is in a similar position. Should they build the tools that enable systematic repression and profit from it?
Sure, they can claim they're "only following orders" but when has that ever worked out well?
I'm all about fairness. Right now, Chinese companies have way more freedom in how they operate in West, than Western companies have in China. All I argued is that is fair for Western governments to put pressure and stand-up for fairness.
>Facebook is responsible for the damage because Facebook built the tools that enabled bad actors to hack democracies and Facebook profited from it (in the short term)
Yeah. They really dropped the ball on that one eh .. how could they have not foreseen being targeted by a major world power with limitless military, cyber and espionage resources. Are you nuts? Tech companies building photo-sharing social networks for grandma should not be left to deal with blatant attacks from belligerent world powers. Defense is the primary function of the nation state, not Facebook!
>ure, they can claim they're "only following orders" but when has that ever worked out well?
What are you talking about? What orders?
If doing business in the USA is free & good, many outsider businesses will do business there as well. If doing business in China is not all free & good, outsider business won't do business there. How much that hurts foreign businesses vs hurts China is up for debate. But governments individually rule what goes on in their borders, and use those rules both for internal ideological pursuit as well as to attract or detract external interest, as is their role.
"Fairness" of doing business isn't exactly extreme human rights violations or anything. (Other behaviors are, but not this particular point you're making.)
Presumably even you think there is some line a tech company shouldn't cross, right?
Contrived example, if a printing company wanted to expand into China they would not be allowed print anti Chinese government documents. Would we be as up in arms about this or should there be a law saying that until China increases human rightsn EU/US companies can't work there and Chinese companies can't work/sell to EU/US?
Obviously this won't/can't happen given our dependence on cheap Chinese manufacturing and our need for year on year growth.
Let's say Saudi Arabia approaches Facebook and wants access to profile and location data to help round up all the gay people in the country to be executed. Maybe they even offer to pay a lot of money, so it'll be profitable.
That's fine with you? Those local laws, amirite?
I have absolutely no faith at all that any large company can really stick to some moral compass. Eventually money corrupts all. Any individual morality and sense of responsibility gets diluted to the point where it disappears completely.
I mean, let's take your reasoning to its logical conclusion: I think most would agree that not paying taxes isn't very ethical, does it mean that we shouldn't have any laws and regulations and controlling bodies surrounding these topics because it's a line "a tech company shouldn't cross"?
If you don't put a cop on the line and there's money on the other side I can assure you that it will be crossed. Raising outrage at the company is not an effective way to enforce the law (although it can work at times).
What? No, it means that we shouldn't shrug off bad corporate behavior and say oh well, I guess tax avoidance was good for their quarterly profits.
Raising outrage is an important check on corporate behavior, even moreso in a place like HN, where employers like Google hope to recruit employees.
I'm not saying that you shouldn't be outraged and voice it, I'm saying that for something as large and intricate as our economical and political relashionship with China you can't really expect it to achieve much. The consequences of outrage should be to change laws and regulations to make sure that it never happens again, not Google saying "oh sorry, I won't do it (this time)".
I don't think that's the parent point, it's more that if you do consider that doing business with the Chinese state is unethical then it makes more sense to push for regulation rather than expect big multinational companies to Do The Right Thing. Right now it seems that we're in a race to the bottom and the Chinese government is making the rules.
How does it make more sense? You can't influence foreign policy of your government and you won't find a party with such specific topics which is also powerful enough to actually accomplish something.
With a company like google you can create a shitstorm that will cost them. You can break a companies reputation with a hand full influencers those days.
PS. a company is not a robot (we'd even expect ethics from them). It consists of humans and we should expect acting ethical from a human. They don't get a license to kill the moment they enter their office.
How can we be comfortable with google or any company going to China and effectively saying yup, thats ok.
if you marketed yourself in such a way, you shouldn't be surprised if the general public applies different standards to you.
Because the purpose and intent of the censorship matters. China's censorship is about suppressing dissent against a human-rights violating authoritarian regime. Western censorship is about suppressing harmful crimes like child abuse and sometimes intellectual property violations. Those goals are not comparable.
Also, China is massively powerful and influential. Many of the countries with similarly strict censorship regimes are so small and weak that they'll never attract the same kind of attention.
they set that standard for themselves...
- Most people care a lot how corporations behave. Many corporations have a very, very bad reputation and it affects their business. E.G: I know more than one person who deleted their facebook.
- Google got its popularity by indicating it was not a standard corporation ("Don't be evil" and acting on it). Google is free to sell that away, but if it does it loses a hard-to-quantify place in our idealistic hearts.
- Maybe you're right, maybe we should hold other tech companies to a higher standard too.
- The US Gov has no effective means to change the structure of China's government. It also cares more about trade and stability than the freedom of China's population.
Google wants to do business in China; and it does so by obeying Chinese regulations. It obeys the law. End of story.
If you want to change it, lobby the PRC.
The regulations in China are immoral. Obeying immoral laws is also immoral. (If the law says 'gas the [ethnic group]' it is still wrong to do it).
If Google must follow immoral laws to operate in China, they should not operate in China.
I don't have any pull with the PRC but I can boycott Google.
If you want to have input in a powerful entity, I really recommend starting a government. If you have an old one layout around, maybe dust if off and use that, but it’ll probably take some work.
I don’t know where you live, but in the US, there’s a bunch of people who are interested in reviving their government entity. They can’t do it alone, though. Here’s the website:
https://www.dsausa.org
Also, I'm sure a number of google employees, and the population in general feel this way. When their engineers have to answer for building the mental handcuffs for China, it may not quite be the bragging right it once was.
Using a private company to earn an income and then saying "I can't do anything about [bad thing company is doing], companies are by their nature amoral profit chasing beasts" is moral cowardice.
If you work for or with that evil entity, you can do something about it. That it would impact your comfortable lifestyle is not really relevant to the moral calculus.
The only thing that will make things better is many people individually doing the right thing.
The real world isn't black & white like that. By operating in China, Google isn't making _less_ information available to the average Chinese internet user, since Baidu, Bing etc are already censored anyway. If anything, it will likely be a net win in terms of access to information and user experience as we'd finally see some meaningful competition to Baidu.
In USA, they obey the copyright laws (often described as draconian, with major companies getting copyright extensions again and again, e.g. Disney) and allow DMCA to suppress this information.
In Europe, they obey the "right to be forgotten".
there is no different standard. it is unethical to aid totalitarian states in their oppression of their people.
that standard is crystal clear, and google is on the wrong side of it.
waffling regarding corporate responsibility is irrelevant because the question of whether the actor is a corporation or not has nothing to do with the standard itself. once again: the moral issue is very clear on what is acceptable and what is not acceptable.
selling widgets to the chinese is not in violation of that standard. offering a product that is neutered so as to be a tool of oppression is in clear violation of the standard.
the question of china using these tools to oppress their population is not up for debate. china is a police state. for ethnic minorities like the uighurs, the falun gong, the chinese muslims, etc, that police state is operationalized to eradicate and prevent any presence in society.
this is not right. it is not right to help the chinese state keep groups of people subjugated and starving.
the apologists should be ashamed. google should be ashamed. google employees should be ashamed, and outraged.
Because Google "is not a conventional company" [1].
A tired trope on HN is that corporations cannot and should not be ethical entities. They are legally mandated to maximize shareholder value, and this usually requires taking actions that people find morally repugnant.
This is a myth and it is horseshit.
Google's mission is to "organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful" [2]. Larry and Sergey knew that realizing its mission requires a long-term focus and a moral center that is unusual for modern corporations.
The public must trust Google to do the right thing even when it's not in Google's short-term interest.
Organic search results skewed by ad payments or censorship is antithetical to Google's mission.
Of course they could make huge short-term profits by compromising the quality and completeness of information, but they've wisely fought against this from the beginning.
This is a rational strategy to maximize the long-term value of the company, and it's worked incredibly well [3].
It would be a crying shame to stop now.
[1] https://abc.xyz/investor/founders-letters/2004/ipo-letter.ht...
[2] https://www.google.com/about/our-company/
[3] https://imgur.com/a/LfuM4eQ
Could this development be a sign that some of the power of the founders is diminishing within Google and has transferred to e.g. major shareholders?
If what they are doing is legal so be it, what we want to be legal is the real question. Should we be doing business with countries that don't have the same beliefs that we do? The other side is that encouraging companies like google into China could help in the long run.
Exactly. As for an example of a company showing some backbone...
https://www.macobserver.com/tmo/article/tim-cook-soundly-rej...:
"When we work on making our devices accessible by the blind," he said, "I don't consider the bloody ROI." He said that the same thing about environmental issues, worker safety, and other areas where Apple is a leader.
He didn't stop there, however, as he looked directly at the NCPPR representative and said,
"If you want me to do things only for ROI reasons, you should get out of this stock."
(of course, Apple does do business in China and practices app censorship there, so...)
One would assume it implies offering services to people in China is a goal. Perhaps "do the right thing" is open to interpretation.
> Organic search results skewed by ad payments or censorship is antithetical to Google's mission.
Has Google's policy of blocking images of pedophilia from search results in countries where the laws and morals of the country forbid those images compromised its mission? Or is there room in the mission for the nuance that different people have different common standards?
This is not true, people care, but not enough to make them stay away from Google. Violating privacy is not that high on most people's mind. If we knew, for example, that Google search engine uses child slave labour, a lot of people would stay away from it. But if it's just remembers what you searched for, most people kinda care, but not enough to inconvenience themselves by using something else. It's not binary, it's a spectrum. And new developments move people's opinions along this spectrum.
Is this because of expectations (i.e. no one expected MS to hold the moral high ground, but Google was famous for its "Do no evil" mantra)? In which case, well, maybe Google's branding backfired in this case :-/
https://techcrunch.com/2018/07/17/apples-icloud-user-data-in...
1. the hyper-moralising over google's business decisions, they're not the only company that modifies its business to access the chinese market nor is the chinese government the only one that demands censorship.
2. google employees' attempts to sabotage the company's business prospects.
2. I think that is because they love working there, they hold their employer to a very high standard, and they don't want to take a pay cut to work for another (perhaps US-only) company with morals more aligned to theirs.
Doing (or even thinking about) ethical business, puts you at a disadvantage over those that care more about profit and increasing their power. Losing prospective profits by doing the right thing is not a popular choice for a commercial business, so the incentives are there to just sell out your soul and go along with censorship (or spying on your users). For Facebook, this went on for years, until they found themselves in a mess. This mess was the result of 1000s of decisions made by all employees (not just upper management). I commend Google's employees for standing up for their beliefs and vision for the company. Only in a very Ayn Rand world is this sabotage. I am sure the big chief in charge of foreign markets views it as sabotage, but luckily Google is not run by only Eric Schmidt's.
> google employees' attempts to sabotage the company's business prospects.
So having concerns about people getting killed for their opinions and whatnot is "hyper-moralising", but having concerns about "backstabbing" your employer isn't. Gotcha.
And it's not even backstabbing. When a friend of yours has a really horrible idea -- and that is putting it hyper-mildly in this context -- you are being more of a friend to them when you try to stop them.
People are hyper moralizing because Google is hyper powerful.
"With great power comes great responsibility".
>google employees' attempts to sabotage the company's business prospects.
Perhaps they are doing so because they see these as attemts to sabotage Google's mission:
"To organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful."
In their hay days, they crafted that hippy/liberal/sensible young alpha image to win customer approval, reducing government regulation and eat market shares against those faceless corporates.
Now they are the new baddies in town, the image no longer does them any good. They will retire it by then and be a normal company.
China, et al, will get a pass.
Remember this is HN. That saying has been warped to read:
"With great power comes great piles of cash"
I would love to hear from more native Chinese people, but from what I've seen so far, most of them would much rather have access to limited services than nothing at all. Not being able to make Duo calls, access Play Store, access AppEngine, access Youtube, etc is far more of an issue to them than not being able to Google about tiananmen square.
I'm sure google's "analytics" say they are doing great and results are more relevant and engaging for them and their corporate partners than ever, but I am often walking away from a search not finding what I know still exists on the web. They are just a massive media conglomerate trying to promote other massive media orgs and their content, content that doesn't live in that bubble is increasingly out of bounds.
That said, DDG isn't that much worse than Google in terms of search quality, and is perfectly fine for more "serious" queries - It's an inferior user experience, admittedly, but I'm willing to drink RC Cola instead of drinking cane-sugar old-recipe Coke that also is contaminated with lead.
Because it's not a fact? Or just a fact in a narrow community you belong to?
I haven't seen anybody using something else for at least 10 years now.
Be from North Korea or Cuba etc and then see if PayPal opens an account for you. I don't see PayPal fights for it, they simply abide the law and move on.
You have a company and the gov gives you tons of regulations that most of them are unfair? Your problem, take it or leave it.
This is really far from the truth,Israel and Saudi arabia are example how this is bullshit.
Communists are totally ok with these limited versions, they are more than eager to "lure in" foreign dotcoms. Their logic is: "let them grow business in China, when the time comes, their business in China becomes so big, that it can be held hostage, we can demand them anything"
Look at AirBnB:
They were swearing on the graves of their fathers that you ID verification data is gone the moment it is verified, .... yet you will be super surprised to see that if you book a place in China, ALL YOUR ID DATA will be automatically filed into the form that hotels have to send to Chinese ministry of interior.
I rarely need to look for those censored stuff anyway even in the US.
It would help to understand the geopolitical causes of this environment instead of the constant faux outrage over Google doing what any business does, which is provide services in accordance to the laws where they operate.
I do not want a world where a few major US tech companies become political powers. This effort should be directed towards the government forces where it matters.
What you do and under which circumstances you offer your business is a political statement, whether you want it or not.
There's no way out. You will be held responsible for what you do and what you don't do.
And that's fair actually. After all, with great power comes great responsibility. (At least in strict utilitarian sense action, non-action, private-public policies and so on are undoubtedly very much fall under the same consideration. That is, is it possible for the big company to do something? To maximize its utility function? If yes, then they should, right? Now it's up to the people to keep that function useful for them.)
They already are political powers because they are major companies. Tech and US doesn't really matter here. Google is among the biggest companies of the world. (Alphabet is currently 3rd on whatever 2018 list I just found.)
When a company this big moves results in a lot of currents shifting, and that means economies can change. And that's very much political. (Especially when it means cross-border business, and imported/exported competition and so on.)
I have a close friend who's a member of the communist party, but we speak about these things frankly. This is my own opinion after talking with them
0. There was an uprising in 1989, and the people who protested were mown down with machineguns
1. The generation afterwards are conditioned to tie the communist party with China's new prosperity. Ie, the wealth you enjoy has only been possible thanks to the leadership of the communist party.
2. The people have no concept of how/why they would rule. It's a job for someone else. Setting the laws is viewed as a thing for experts, and if you wanted to set the law you'd join the communist party.
That's why I question what the outrage is all about, when the very people living there have already made their choice.
Hell, the principle that the people are the rightful rulers is part of the PRC's name.
The people living there include those on May 35th that died for the freedom to choose who they vote for, as well as those in Hong Kong who are still frequently kidnapped.
2) the very fact that china has 1.4B makes the existence of an authoritarian government much more easier to understand. without defending the actions of the PRC, from a purely utilitarian standpoint censorship and state control of the media allows for greater social cohesion and the avoidance of ideas and movements that can spread and cause mass hysteria. china is very aware of its own history of such movements and the havoc they've created (the Taiping Rebellion for a great example).
for instance, there is likely a law on the books in the USA which prohibits you from having your cattle graze on various lands. you would be incrementally more free if there was not that law, but do you care? no, the issue is not relevant to your life, nor is it relevant to any life you could imagine yourself realistically having from the starting point of the present moment. if you were a cattle farmer the issue would be more salient -- but there's still no guarantee that you would be railing against the law.
now, imagine that the prospect of democracy was what was forbidden, as it is in china. it's abstract, and the benefits are purely hypothetical for the chinese -- but there are hypothetical liabilities that come with democracy too, which might seem just as salient if you don't start from a position of being in favor of democracy.
China is not a democracy, that's why. This should not be a shocking revelation. It is also easy to forget that there was a civil war in China after the Japanese withdrawal, and the American-backed Republic of China lost (they retreated to Taiwan; this is why such a small island is such a big deal to China). That was when the choice was made, and the Chinese people have not had a choice since then.
"It would help to understand the geopolitical causes of this environment"
Have you been living under a rock? China has one of the best-documented systems of censorship and propaganda, operated at the largest scale in human history. The Internet has greatly aided both of those efforts -- the great firewall for censorship, the 50-cent army for propaganda.
This has been explored ad nauseum, and there has been plenty of news about how the Chinese have refined and developed their various methods.
Or you mean even the code which doesn't leave company servers? Do you have a source then, because I'd have a hard time believing that.
I wouldn't be surprised if this included the source code of everything that ships with the device, but I'd think it doesn't extend to server-side code.
The actual implementation is important here. Does the Chinese government require the companies send them a tarball or just the opportunity to inspect it on the companies terms?
If it's the latter, I can see all kind of companies complying. It's not unheard of to allow code inspection and auditing by setting up a secure PC with the code with all the USB ports epoxied shut and no network connection. The inspector using it can read and take notes, but the notes have to be reviewed and cleared by the company before they can be taken away.
FTFY
Given the large majority seem to have no problem with Google, Facebook and others, and their ability to attract employees is unaffected it's obvious ethics is not a high priority for current or prospective employees, if anything the fawning is often cringy.
That also explains why inspite of Snowden's revelations no one really cares and there is no change. So there is little basis for ethical concern about China, unless the motive is purely posturing and grandstanding.
This is disgusting! I am not using Google Search anymore because of Firefox+DDG, but where are alternatives to YouTube, Gmail, Gmaps?
I can wholeheartedly endorse them. One other benefit is that they actually have real live humans doing customer support. I haven't needed it much (only when I was setting up my custom domain and feature requests), but it's very reassuring to know it's there.
It was the stories of people who were permanently locked out of their gmail accounts with no recourse and no one to call that ultimately caused me to abandon Google.
Although admittedly, their phone operation is also controversial by letting works work extensively.
https://techcrunch.com/2018/07/17/apples-icloud-user-data-in...
Do you honestly think that's less bad than blocking a few websites that are already blocked and can be bypassed by VPN?
Singling out Google for not opting to exclude a fifth of the population of this planet from their products is a bit overkill. I'd rather they offer choice to the Chinese people on their terms than opting to not be in China at all. Google has huge stakes in China with Android, related production of many Android devices, and a lot of their other products. I imagine pulling out of China is not very practical for them at this point nor is selling phones without Google search.
When I was still working on search Nokia Maps (now Here maps) we had to comply with all sorts of rules internationally, including for China. In addition to being weird about certain POIs (e.g. Tien an mien square) we also had to deal with their obfuscated GPS coordinates. They use some weird shifting algorithm that you have to license from them. The point is not the algorithm (you can find it online if you dig hard enough) but the fact that you had to talk to them to get a license. It's a control point for them.
Another weird thing was that Iran insisted on referring to the Gulf as the Persian Gulf. One nice edge case there is the inflight maps of planes flying over their territory.
The point here is that doing business internationally is hard and taking the moral high ground basically means not doing business with a lot of countries.
In a bigger context, the Internet business, and Google in particular, is a product of a free, liberal society. It couldn't have existed without freedom. Thus freedom is linked with success. So, as long as Google is innovative, it has that inherent advantage over its Chinese competitors.
I would argue that the basic design of the Internet is the most efficient way to build a large-scale, general-purpose computer network; this is why it has subsumed or is in the process of subsuming every other system. Had China been the world's largest economy at the time I think they would have developed the Internet too -- maybe they would have tried to build some kind of censorship in, but they would have quickly discovered that it is just more efficient to censor at the edges (I think they are already aware of this fact, given the amount of censorship they require from social media websites and the last-resort role the Great Firewall plays; there is also the general tolerance of businesses using VPNs to avoid the Great Firewall).
For what it's worth, there is innovation coming out of China, and it is happening at an increasing pace as the Chinese economy grows. The freedom to criticize your government or to organize a protest movement is not really necessary for technical innovation.
Besides, Internet, being as wide open to anonymity as it is, simply never would never have been developed in a country like China, it would be deemed too dangerous. They may compete these days in electronics, but it doesn't mean they can compete in everything. Totalitarian society is always rotten in one way or another, and it manifests in all its output, including business, science, technology and culture. I'm saying this as a person born in the USSR.
Sure, a measure of freedom is necessary to allow an economy to grow, but not nearly as much freedom as people enjoy in the USA. China is a case-in-point: their economy has rapidly expanded as the communist party has started to understand how far a bit of economic freedom goes. For all the freedoms people have in Japan, China managed to unseat Japan as the world's second-largest economy, and is on track to become the world's largest economy within our lifetimes.
China is not the USSR. China has embraced certain capitalist approaches -- like capital markets. The Chinese have figured out what the USSR never fully grasped: economic freedom is not the same thing as political freedom. The USSR tried to micromanage every aspect of the economy, but the Chinese have figured out that it is good enough to have a party member seated on the board of directors.
The US started a game of Civilization on easy mode.
Incidentally, this is precisely where your Civilization analogy goes wrong: the real newly formed states have way more powerful centrifugal factors than those embedded into mechanics of the game.
Very much agreed. And I'd add that by offering that choice they're making Chinese internet users strictly better off, rather than worse off. By operating in China, Google isn't making any _less_ information available to Chinese internet users, since Baidu, Bing etc are already censored anyway. If anything, it will likely be a net win in terms of access to information and user experience as we'd finally see some meaningful competition to Baidu.
Win.win.
Monsters.