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HN seems super strongly opposed to Google providing censorship in China. Do they feel the same way about Google applying it to the rest of the world?

• Kaveren 8y ago
  There's a strong difference between state mandated censorship and a company voluntarily censoring content on their platform. A company has the absolute right to prohibit any content on their platform that they so choose. There's freedom not to use Google services. Calls to regulate independent companies are purely ludicrous. If Facebook said tomorrow that any positive mention of, say, Paul Graham, would result in immediate account deletion, that'd be their choice. Very valid criticism from the perspective of a user would be warranted, but that's where it should end.
  • bzbarsky 8y ago
    > There's freedom not to use Google services. Using Google services is now required by many public schools in the US. That's where all the homework is posted, for example. Now in the US there's freedom to not attend public school, of course, so technically you have the right to not use Google services. But in practice the vast majority of people would not be able to exercise that right in this case. Similarly, a number of schools are starting to do communications with parents purely through Facebook. And I expect this trend will keep getting worse before it gets better. > Calls to regulate independent companies are purely ludicrous. If they're really independent companies, yes. If they're government-sponsored monopolies, on the other hand, the calculus is quite different. And we're quite close to that line, if not over it. You could argue that the right solution is for governments to not enshrine these companies in these monopoly positions. That would be lovely, obviously. Too bad the companies are spending all this money to get into those positions (see Google Classroom).
    • Kaveren 8y ago
      I'd find a private school / homeschool argument disingenuous, so I'm with you that far. Google Classroom is a fair point (schools also use Google Docs and the like as well), but I don't believe it holds water. Governments would be well within their rights not to award contracts to, or use the services of, companies they felt were not respecting the values of free speech. The difference between this and active regulation are that one is voluntary for the company (must obey this term for eligibility for extra reward) and one is mandatory (must obey this term or be punished by the law). I don't have much to say about communicating to parents through Facebook, other than that they should still offer optional email communication.
      • bzbarsky 8y ago
        For what it's worth, I don't understand why you're being downvoted... :( I just upvoted you. I agree that the optimal solution would be for local governments to not rely on Google like this. What's not clear to me is what the best course of action is in the world in which they _are_. I think having "no propaganda aimed at elementary school students" regulation may be the only way to solve the coordination problem here, but of course that has the obvious flaw of it being hard to agree on a definition of "propaganda"...
  • tomohawk 8y ago
    This may be true for companies that are not monopolies (arguable, though). However, Google is clearly a monopoly and once you're a monopoly, many activities that are fine for other companies are no longer fine. Also note that fascism is about political control of all the things. It doesn't mean than the government runs all the things, but controls all the things. With Google in bed with a single party, and exercising its power on behalf of that party, we're in a very dangerous situation.
• friedman23 8y ago
  Censorship isn't the problem it's data sharing policies.