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>It seems to me that the presence of any international company could only act as a wedge to gradually loosen censorship controls over time. this was the justif
by throwaway2048 8y ago
>It seems to me that the presence of any international company could only act as a wedge to gradually loosen censorship controls over time.
this was the justification to the more lenient treatment of china with international trade deals, it has gone nowhere, all that has happened it is has economically empowered china to become a lot more troublesome on the world stage, while they have not liberalized in virtually any way.
The presence of Google legitimizes and empowers the state level control of information that the CCP does at a massive scale, it does exactly the opposite of "acting as a wedge to gradually loosen censorship"
Should be noted that China is a country, that right now as we speak, is putting an entire ethnic group in concentration camps, 1 million+ people and more coming in an attempt to "reeducate them" and stamp out their culture.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/15/opinion/china-re-education-camps.html https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/15/opinion/china-re-educatio...
https://foreignpolicy.com/2018/07/24/islamic-leaders-have-nothing-to-say-about-chinas-internment-camps-for-muslims/ https://foreignpolicy.com/2018/07/24/islamic-leaders-have-no...
This is not a system that Google should be legitimizing through collaboration.
- beaner 8y agoI think this ignores the rest of my comment. Not sure I agree that trade deals and search engines work the same way. You could also say that the United States is an imperialist devil that kills innocents in the middle east with drones, and that Google should exit the US in protest and move to Europe. But that doesn't seem like a great argument.
- opnitro 8y agoSeems like a decent argument to me dude.
- beaner 8y agoCan't tell if you mean this as a joke, but the following this logically we'd find that every country is doing something immoral, and if we all exited/revolted at governments not 100% completely moral, we'd have a lawless anarchy of a world which is much worse than the one we live in now.
- opnitro 8y agoSure, but lines should be drawn somewhere. The invasion of Iraq was a humanitarian nightmare and our country decided not to take any action to punish those who committed it. If the China performing censorship is enough a reason for Google to morally avoid that market, then the US certainly falls on the other side of the line as well. And if that's too far in the distant past, the war in Yemin should suffice.
- beaner 8y agoFor me, "somewhere" is the line between business and politics. People can use voice and voting to change their laws, and businesses are free to roam within those laws. Promoting politics through business is a conflation that doesn't seem to serve anyone very well.
- throwaway2048 8y agobusiness and politics are not separate spheres.
- opnitro 8y agoSo as long as it is legal, everything is ethical for a business? This isn't meant to be a snarky comeback, I just really don't understand your point of view. If a business could legally get away with selling guns to an obvious terrorist organization, should they?
- Leary 8y agoThis is going on because of in-group fallacies. Anything that some Americans do wrong is because of "other Americans" or the Republican Party. Anything that some Chinese do wrong is because of China as a monolithic entity.