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But Apple has to obey the laws of the United States. Here is an alternative viewpoint: If Apple is based in the "right" country (that believes in freedom) --

But Apple has to obey the laws of the United States. Here is an alternative viewpoint: If Apple is based in the "right" country (that believes in freedom) -- and I think you and I seem to agree this is the case, because you don't mention anything bad about the U.S., mentioning only Russia and China by name, and with descriptions like "vile shit", "mass murder", "oppression" --, then the U.S. government should be doing whatever negotiations and interventions need to take place to keep foreign governments from forcing a U.S. company to do evil. Here is an analogy. If you're CEO at a Fortune 500 American company, you don't have to make your life choices so that foreign governments can't blackmail you into doing evil, by kidnapping your family. Because the government protects you from that. If Tim Cook's family were abducted by China to force Tim Cook to have Apple do something... well this scenario is just completely implausible, the whole weight of the entire U.S. government would be all over it, it would be an international issue of immense proportions. I think it's kind of up to the government to keep foreign companies from forcing American companies to do bad things.

jpetso 8y ago
It kind of isn't up to the U.S. government. It's about how you structure your organization to have the right incentives to do the right thing. Apple and numerous other businesses are beholden to shareholders, whose #1 demand is profit. Many shareholders are located in the U.S. - so far, so good. At some point, the business decides that more profit is best obtained through international expansion. Apple extracts money from Europe, China, Russia etc. and delivers the desired returns. Yay. The flipside is that if those returns are in danger of disappearing, there's now an immense pressure to stop that from happening. I don't believe the U.S. government can even help Apple if they don't want to be helped - their primary incentive is not preservation of diversity and free speech, but satisfying the shareholders. Possible fixes: a) Avoid conflicts of interest. Apple is not an American company at this point, it's an international company. So, limit your market reach to regions that align with your principles, i.e. don't expand to Russia and China. Of course, this can never work because public companies are legally obligated to maximize shareholder returns. Which leads to, b) Put incentives in place to prefer doing the right thing over the profitable thing, i.e. don't sell a voting majority of your business to investors who will sacrifice principles for money. Both of these fixes mean sacrificing market share to other, less morally grounded businesses, because you don't get to be a world leader in selling stuff by playing fair. You can't go back to playing fair once you depend on being a world leader. Apple literally can't do anything about it because of what its incentives are, and if it aligned those differently then it wouldn't be the big Apple that we give a shit about. I don't believe there's a solution to this except supporting a decentralized market and educating others about why that's important. Apple is a lost cause, they're at the point of no return. They couldn't fix it if they wanted to. Let's make sure they're only one of several viable options going forward.
veidr 8y ago
I don't think the US government has the desire or ability to do that. Also, I didn't mean to imply by omission that the United States government is not a bad actor. An evidence-based examination of the US government will reveal that it is (when taken as a whole) a deeply and objectively racist institution, has more people incarcerated than China and Russia combined, has killed far more civilians over the past 20 years than China and Russia combined, etc. But as you say, American companies and individuals typically enjoy a far higher degree of freedom from governmental interference than their counterparts in (say) China and Russia. So the reason I didn't mention the US government in this context is simply that they don't exert that type of control (at least, not yet) on platform companies like Apple. Although parts of the US government are trying to ban encryption, and trying to force companies like Apple to create backdoors for the various secret police and law enforcement institutions, they don't seem to be successful with that so far.

jpetso 8y ago

It kind of isn't up to the U.S. government. It's about how you structure your organization to have the right incentives to do the right thing. Apple and numerous other businesses are beholden to shareholders, whose #1 demand is profit. Many shareholders are located in the U.S. - so far, so good. At some point, the business decides that more profit is best obtained through international expansion. Apple extracts money from Europe, China, Russia etc. and delivers the desired returns. Yay. The flipside is that if those returns are in danger of disappearing, there's now an immense pressure to stop that from happening. I don't believe the U.S. government can even help Apple if they don't want to be helped - their primary incentive is not preservation of diversity and free speech, but satisfying the shareholders. Possible fixes: a) Avoid conflicts of interest. Apple is not an American company at this point, it's an international company. So, limit your market reach to regions that align with your principles, i.e. don't expand to Russia and China. Of course, this can never work because public companies are legally obligated to maximize shareholder returns. Which leads to, b) Put incentives in place to prefer doing the right thing over the profitable thing, i.e. don't sell a voting majority of your business to investors who will sacrifice principles for money. Both of these fixes mean sacrificing market share to other, less morally grounded businesses, because you don't get to be a world leader in selling stuff by playing fair. You can't go back to playing fair once you depend on being a world leader. Apple literally can't do anything about it because of what its incentives are, and if it aligned those differently then it wouldn't be the big Apple that we give a shit about. I don't believe there's a solution to this except supporting a decentralized market and educating others about why that's important. Apple is a lost cause, they're at the point of no return. They couldn't fix it if they wanted to. Let's make sure they're only one of several viable options going forward.

veidr 8y ago

I don't think the US government has the desire or ability to do that. Also, I didn't mean to imply by omission that the United States government is not a bad actor. An evidence-based examination of the US government will reveal that it is (when taken as a whole) a deeply and objectively racist institution, has more people incarcerated than China and Russia combined, has killed far more civilians over the past 20 years than China and Russia combined, etc. But as you say, American companies and individuals typically enjoy a far higher degree of freedom from governmental interference than their counterparts in (say) China and Russia. So the reason I didn't mention the US government in this context is simply that they don't exert that type of control (at least, not yet) on platform companies like Apple. Although parts of the US government are trying to ban encryption, and trying to force companies like Apple to create backdoors for the various secret police and law enforcement institutions, they don't seem to be successful with that so far.