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To me, this feels like an area Uncle Sam and the EU need to get involved in. Declare all censorship or need to comply with the Great Firewall to be a trade barr

To me, this feels like an area Uncle Sam and the EU need to get involved in. Declare all censorship or need to comply with the Great Firewall to be a trade barrier, freeze out all Chinese tech companies on that basis, and find a way to strongly discourage American and European companies from in any way enabling it.

kyrra 7y ago
From the arguments at the time when dragonfly was leaked, it was brought up that there is censorship, though in a different form, already in the EU. Be it right to be forgotten, or filtering of information related to things unsavory to the past of any given country in the EU. Then the US and EU both have censorship around things protected by law. So you can sue people to take down slanderous material, or material that violates copyrights or trademarks.
- Kurtz79 7y ago
  Right to be forgotten gives the individual the right to have his data removed from permanent storage by companies, for whatever purpose: not sure how it relates even remotely with censorship. " filtering of information related to things unsavory to the past of any given country in the EU." Some specific reference to some EU government forcing companies to remove controversial information about their countries' past would help making your point (not saying it doesn't happen).
  - dpatru 7y ago
    > Right to be forgotten gives the individual the right to have his data removed from permanent storage by companies, for whatever purpose: not sure how it relates even remotely with censorship. Books are also permanent storage, often stored centrally in public libraries. Does an individual have the right to have information about him removed from books in libraries? Wouldn't that be a kind of censorship? The only difference is that so called "right to be forgotten" applies to Google's electronic storage rather than your local library's books. Just like you don't have a right to remove pages about you from your local public library's copy of your high school yearbook, so you shouldn't have the right to remove information about yourself from Google's indexes. Both are censorship.
    - anticensor 7y ago
      No, right to be forgotten is not excercised via criminal courts. You have to reach the author of the book and make it collect all the copies.
  - chillacy 7y ago
    This argument feels like the classic “is killing in wartime murder”. It’s semantic at heart.
  - reaperducer 7y ago
    It's my understanding that Nazi stuff is prohibited in various ways in Germany and France. I watched a movie recently (though not a recent movie) that had a scene with some Nazi stuff in the background of one scene. The IMDB trivia notes for the film stated that the scene was removed when it was released in Germany. (If I can remember the film, I'll edit this comment.)
- peteretep 7y ago
  > Be it right to be forgotten Works for me, and seems to empower the people, rather than the state... > filtering of information related to things unsavory to the past of any given country in the EU Could you link me to some credible sources for this?
  - kyrra 7y ago
    https://newrepublic.com/article/147364/verboten-germany-law-stopping-hate-speech-facebook-twitter https://newrepublic.com/article/147364/verboten-germany-law-... Not filtering, but censorship.
- HALtheWise 7y ago
  You're getting a lot of flack for this comment, but I think it's a reasonable way of looking at the problem. In the United States, we have strong cultural conceptions about what are acceptable reasons for the government and companies to forcably suppress information (copyright violations, "terrorist" content, white supremacy, child pornography) and what aren't (political dissidence, social stability, insults, most other porn). Culturally, the Chinese have about the same attitude towards political dissidence that we have towards terrorist recruiting content, and for many of the same reasons. Historically, they have seen how political turmoil, if allowed to recruit, can hurt and kill people just how we have seen that terrorism can do the same. Similarly, the American attitude towards copyright, trademark, and patent laws probably seems ridiculous and borderline unethical to Chinese companies looking to do business here. They seem (from the outside) to have no problem with a phone manufacturer calling itself "Applle" to piggyback on Apple's brand, but that is very illegal under American laws. Similarly, the amount of automatic filtering YouTube and other video hosts have to do under DMCA might block as much content as Chinese political auto-filtering does, although I would love to see more analysis of that. Being from an American cultural background myself, I have an obvious set of intuitions about which of these are reasonable and which are ridiculous, but I find it hard to make a clear argument about why.
  - TeMPOraL 7y ago
    > Being from an American cultural background myself, I have an obvious set of intuitions about which of these are reasonable and which are ridiculous, but I find it hard to make a clear argument about why. And being technically from European cultural background but having ingested plenty of American-made utopian visions of the world in my formative years, I find myself to have yet different obvious set of intuitions about this. Like e.g. I think copyright-related censorship is overused and borderline unethical, while speech threatening social stability might be a problem. I say that only to reinforce your point that there's not one and not two, but many differing cultural conceptions about these things.
  - pteredactyl 7y ago
    Self-governed sovereignty. You and the American entities mentioned believe this. And seek to protect it. Including trademark violators, for example (who threaten Apple's 'kingdom' so to speak).
chrischen 7y ago
Any sort of heavy hand the West takes to “prove” that whatever it is that China is doing (censorship, communism, etc) is wrong/doesn’t work is going to backfire to the highest degree. It will entrench them in their already strong beliefs that the West is only interested in holding progress back from China (out of jealousy at their high economic growth). If you believe your system is better, then you really should not have to actively participate in fighting opposing systems of belief. Forcing it through just shows that you are motivated by self interest, and not a core belief in the superiority of your own values. Such a strategy will lose the hearts and minds of the people of China as well, and at which point who are you protecting the rights and interests of anymore if those who you seek to “help” aren’t even on your side?
- JumpCrisscross 7y ago
  > It will entrench them in their already strong beliefs We tried the hug approach when China was prematurely let into the WTO. That backfired. Our concern should be, first and foremost, with our own morality. Helping a dictator repress billions of people is wrong, against our values, and should not tolerated by people in our society.
  - hakka-nyu-su 7y ago
    You say China joined the WTO "prematurely" which implies that certain economic conditions were not met, but the real hold-up was political: questions of liberalism vs Leninism, etc. The Chinese people have gained enormously in terms of their standard of living since 2001, and while political repression has not gotten better, it also has not gotten worse.
    - CodiePetersen 7y ago
      I think better and worse are subjective. But the thought reconditioning camps, the concentration camps for the Muslims, and the forced propaganda app are in my opinion pretty bad.
      - 7y ago
noelsusman 7y ago
Good luck convincing US and EU residents to take a significant economic hit in the name of standing on principle against censorship that doesn't affect them.
- JumpCrisscross 7y ago
  > censorship that doesn't affect them It’s easier to deploy something already built than to build a system from scratch. There is a clear civil rights argument against letting American tech companies build this technology for dictators.
- lvmii 7y ago
  The EU doesn't even have free speech to begin with[] and it doesn't seem like it bothers many people. [] https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2018/10/its-not-free-speech-criticize-muhammad-echr-ruled/574174/ https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2018/10/its-not-fr...
  - gowld 7y ago
    That article is about a case of Austrian law that EU allows. EU allows countries to make their own determination. Not all countries ban anti-religious facts. And it does bother many people. But it's not a very big deal because even in the worst case reported in the article, it was a very small penalty for a very large amount of speech. The scale matters.
  - sangnoir 7y ago
    American-style "Free speech" is incompatible with the right-to-be-forgotten, privacy[1] and other ideals that Europeans give primacy. Someone smarter than I am once summarized American freedoms as "Freedom to _", and European ones as "Freedom from _" 1. IIRC, it is illegal for newspapers publish arrestee's full names in Germany to protect their privacy - assumption of innocence and all that. This law wouldn't hold in the US as it infringes on publishers 1A rights
    - lvmii 7y ago
rmrfrmrf 7y ago
That's nice and all, but the reality is that these multinational companies actively and willingly accept these terms (and more!) in order to exploit Chinese labor. The rhetoric about IP and censorship is all bark, no bite because the people at the top knew exactly what they signed up for.
- hnarn 7y ago
  > these multinational companies actively and willingly accept these terms That's why it needs to be worked on a political level, like the post you replied to stated.
  - chillacy 7y ago
    It’s game theory, each company needs to stay ahead of the others and end up in a globally suboptimal state. One solution to the prisoners dilemma is “the don” who ensures nobody defects, aka the government.
    - throwaway2048 7y ago
      aka if you defect the big boss shoots you in the head.
      - TeMPOraL 7y ago
        Yes. Whether actual bullets are involved or means like imprisonment or fines, this literally is the solution to prisonner-dillemma's like problems, and in various forms exists everywhere and forms the underpinning of a civilized society.
- ethbro 7y ago
  > these multinational companies actively and willingly accept these terms (and more!) in order to exploit Chinese labor ... under current international agreements and rules. The agreements and rules change, the calculus changes. Companies optimize continuously for the current environment they find themselves in.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
alephr 7y ago
I agree that there should be action taken to push things like this in a better direction but I think the obvious things to do can easily back fire and just make the situation worse. AFAIK in china there is a lot (not necessarily universal) of support for the government so it would be easy to cast something like this in a way that just bolsters that support (foreign countries trying to hurt china for their own gain) and makes things like this worse. Foreign policy is hard and I don't pretend to know the best way to do it but I think given recent history we have to be more careful about how we try to influence developing nations so that we actually have the effect we want. This might include doing things that could seem unpalatable in the short term.
api 7y ago
Oh yes, this. The Great Firewall is absolutely a trade barrier and I've long suspect that this rather than censorship is its main purpose. It's a way of implementing extremely strong trade barriers (protectionism) while still claiming to be in compliance with the letter of our trade agreements.
oh_sigh 7y ago
The US censors content like child pornography, some bomb making manuals, etc.
ezoe 7y ago
Both US and EU exercise censorship in the name of: + copyrights + trademarks + patents(really bogus patents) + religion(these days, US outright ban any casual religious reference because it offend some believers, resulting modifying some manga/anime/game) + national security + ex-political party symbol(swastika, but they can't tell the difference between nazi symbol and Buddism symbol which is widely used in Japanese commercial products, especially manga/anime/game) + child porno(their definition includes some commercial Japanese manga/anime/game which we believe not possibly be a child porn since it's a pure fiction and no real-life human being harmed). I believe these are also a trade barrier for Japan. But I bet you disagree some of the above points and justify the censorship because it's against your moral based on your culture.
- patejam 7y ago
  So a couple things (From the US perspective): 1. Copyright, trademarks, and patents are a pretty weak argument for "censorship" IMO. But I guess I see where you're coming from. There are also many "fair-use" exceptions for these that make it less "censorship" and more "preventing profit on other people's ideas". 2. "US outright ban any casual religious reference because it offend some believers, resulting modifying some manga/anime/game" -- Can you give an example? This seems to go directly against first amendment rights. 3. "national security" -- There have been many cases where the government will work with press to attempt to stop them from releasing information that would damage national security. There have also been many cases where the press has not listened, and they're allowed to do that. What specifically are you talking about here? Direct theft of government property/information is illegal, but I would hardly call that censorship. NDAs I guess are censorship, but they are an agreement between two parties, not the government deciding arbitrarily what to censor. 4. "ex-political party symbol" -- absolutely not banned in the US. 5. Okay the last one is a fair example of censorship. I'm not familiar with the US laws on that one and frankly I don't want to find out...
  - judge2020 7y ago
    Also, trademarks just had a supreme court decision that makes it so they can't deny "immoral"/"scandalous" trademarks since it was subjective and up to the trademark officer on whether or not something was immoral/scandalous. https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/supreme-court/supreme-court-allows-trademark-f-word-soundalike-n1014796 https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/supreme-court/supreme-court...
aclsid 7y ago
Trade barrier? Since when services offered through the web are paying taxes in the places where they are rendering their services. If anything, expect a lot more governments to wisen up, like the US did with Amazon and taxes, and create these barriers to have people actually play by local rules. That I don't agree with Chinese rules is one thing but it is their country. But let's be perfectly clear that the Chinese did this out of censorship and the trade part happened to be a side-effect.
mankash666 7y ago
China takes such stances on many issues, and flexes it's power. For instance, a private company referring too Taiwan as a separate country can expect severe blowback from China
pteredactyl 7y ago
Unfortunately it seems both countries (or large entities therein: US Politicians, Google, US Media, etc.) are in fact, allied, whether aware or not, with the Communist Party of China. Seems we'd best be served to first collectively realize this. Then do as you suggest.

kyrra 7y ago

From the arguments at the time when dragonfly was leaked, it was brought up that there is censorship, though in a different form, already in the EU. Be it right to be forgotten, or filtering of information related to things unsavory to the past of any given country in the EU. Then the US and EU both have censorship around things protected by law. So you can sue people to take down slanderous material, or material that violates copyrights or trademarks.

Kurtz79 7y ago
Right to be forgotten gives the individual the right to have his data removed from permanent storage by companies, for whatever purpose: not sure how it relates even remotely with censorship. " filtering of information related to things unsavory to the past of any given country in the EU." Some specific reference to some EU government forcing companies to remove controversial information about their countries' past would help making your point (not saying it doesn't happen).
- dpatru 7y ago
  > Right to be forgotten gives the individual the right to have his data removed from permanent storage by companies, for whatever purpose: not sure how it relates even remotely with censorship. Books are also permanent storage, often stored centrally in public libraries. Does an individual have the right to have information about him removed from books in libraries? Wouldn't that be a kind of censorship? The only difference is that so called "right to be forgotten" applies to Google's electronic storage rather than your local library's books. Just like you don't have a right to remove pages about you from your local public library's copy of your high school yearbook, so you shouldn't have the right to remove information about yourself from Google's indexes. Both are censorship.
  - anticensor 7y ago
    No, right to be forgotten is not excercised via criminal courts. You have to reach the author of the book and make it collect all the copies.
- chillacy 7y ago
  This argument feels like the classic “is killing in wartime murder”. It’s semantic at heart.
- reaperducer 7y ago
  It's my understanding that Nazi stuff is prohibited in various ways in Germany and France. I watched a movie recently (though not a recent movie) that had a scene with some Nazi stuff in the background of one scene. The IMDB trivia notes for the film stated that the scene was removed when it was released in Germany. (If I can remember the film, I'll edit this comment.)
peteretep 7y ago
> Be it right to be forgotten Works for me, and seems to empower the people, rather than the state... > filtering of information related to things unsavory to the past of any given country in the EU Could you link me to some credible sources for this?
- kyrra 7y ago
  https://newrepublic.com/article/147364/verboten-germany-law-stopping-hate-speech-facebook-twitter https://newrepublic.com/article/147364/verboten-germany-law-... Not filtering, but censorship.
HALtheWise 7y ago
You're getting a lot of flack for this comment, but I think it's a reasonable way of looking at the problem. In the United States, we have strong cultural conceptions about what are acceptable reasons for the government and companies to forcably suppress information (copyright violations, "terrorist" content, white supremacy, child pornography) and what aren't (political dissidence, social stability, insults, most other porn). Culturally, the Chinese have about the same attitude towards political dissidence that we have towards terrorist recruiting content, and for many of the same reasons. Historically, they have seen how political turmoil, if allowed to recruit, can hurt and kill people just how we have seen that terrorism can do the same. Similarly, the American attitude towards copyright, trademark, and patent laws probably seems ridiculous and borderline unethical to Chinese companies looking to do business here. They seem (from the outside) to have no problem with a phone manufacturer calling itself "Applle" to piggyback on Apple's brand, but that is very illegal under American laws. Similarly, the amount of automatic filtering YouTube and other video hosts have to do under DMCA might block as much content as Chinese political auto-filtering does, although I would love to see more analysis of that. Being from an American cultural background myself, I have an obvious set of intuitions about which of these are reasonable and which are ridiculous, but I find it hard to make a clear argument about why.
- TeMPOraL 7y ago
  > Being from an American cultural background myself, I have an obvious set of intuitions about which of these are reasonable and which are ridiculous, but I find it hard to make a clear argument about why. And being technically from European cultural background but having ingested plenty of American-made utopian visions of the world in my formative years, I find myself to have yet different obvious set of intuitions about this. Like e.g. I think copyright-related censorship is overused and borderline unethical, while speech threatening social stability might be a problem. I say that only to reinforce your point that there's not one and not two, but many differing cultural conceptions about these things.
- pteredactyl 7y ago
  Self-governed sovereignty. You and the American entities mentioned believe this. And seek to protect it. Including trademark violators, for example (who threaten Apple's 'kingdom' so to speak).

chrischen 7y ago

Any sort of heavy hand the West takes to “prove” that whatever it is that China is doing (censorship, communism, etc) is wrong/doesn’t work is going to backfire to the highest degree. It will entrench them in their already strong beliefs that the West is only interested in holding progress back from China (out of jealousy at their high economic growth). If you believe your system is better, then you really should not have to actively participate in fighting opposing systems of belief. Forcing it through just shows that you are motivated by self interest, and not a core belief in the superiority of your own values. Such a strategy will lose the hearts and minds of the people of China as well, and at which point who are you protecting the rights and interests of anymore if those who you seek to “help” aren’t even on your side?

JumpCrisscross 7y ago
> It will entrench them in their already strong beliefs We tried the hug approach when China was prematurely let into the WTO. That backfired. Our concern should be, first and foremost, with our own morality. Helping a dictator repress billions of people is wrong, against our values, and should not tolerated by people in our society.
- hakka-nyu-su 7y ago
  You say China joined the WTO "prematurely" which implies that certain economic conditions were not met, but the real hold-up was political: questions of liberalism vs Leninism, etc. The Chinese people have gained enormously in terms of their standard of living since 2001, and while political repression has not gotten better, it also has not gotten worse.
  - CodiePetersen 7y ago
    I think better and worse are subjective. But the thought reconditioning camps, the concentration camps for the Muslims, and the forced propaganda app are in my opinion pretty bad.
    - 7y ago

noelsusman 7y ago

Good luck convincing US and EU residents to take a significant economic hit in the name of standing on principle against censorship that doesn't affect them.

JumpCrisscross 7y ago
> censorship that doesn't affect them It’s easier to deploy something already built than to build a system from scratch. There is a clear civil rights argument against letting American tech companies build this technology for dictators.
lvmii 7y ago
The EU doesn't even have free speech to begin with[] and it doesn't seem like it bothers many people. [] https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2018/10/its-not-free-speech-criticize-muhammad-echr-ruled/574174/ https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2018/10/its-not-fr...
- gowld 7y ago
  That article is about a case of Austrian law that EU allows. EU allows countries to make their own determination. Not all countries ban anti-religious facts. And it does bother many people. But it's not a very big deal because even in the worst case reported in the article, it was a very small penalty for a very large amount of speech. The scale matters.
- sangnoir 7y ago
  American-style "Free speech" is incompatible with the right-to-be-forgotten, privacy[1] and other ideals that Europeans give primacy. Someone smarter than I am once summarized American freedoms as "Freedom to _", and European ones as "Freedom from _" 1. IIRC, it is illegal for newspapers publish arrestee's full names in Germany to protect their privacy - assumption of innocence and all that. This law wouldn't hold in the US as it infringes on publishers 1A rights
  - lvmii 7y ago

rmrfrmrf 7y ago

That's nice and all, but the reality is that these multinational companies actively and willingly accept these terms (and more!) in order to exploit Chinese labor. The rhetoric about IP and censorship is all bark, no bite because the people at the top knew exactly what they signed up for.

hnarn 7y ago
> these multinational companies actively and willingly accept these terms That's why it needs to be worked on a political level, like the post you replied to stated.
- chillacy 7y ago
  It’s game theory, each company needs to stay ahead of the others and end up in a globally suboptimal state. One solution to the prisoners dilemma is “the don” who ensures nobody defects, aka the government.
  - throwaway2048 7y ago
    aka if you defect the big boss shoots you in the head.
    - TeMPOraL 7y ago
      Yes. Whether actual bullets are involved or means like imprisonment or fines, this literally is the solution to prisonner-dillemma's like problems, and in various forms exists everywhere and forms the underpinning of a civilized society.
ethbro 7y ago
> these multinational companies actively and willingly accept these terms (and more!) in order to exploit Chinese labor ... under current international agreements and rules. The agreements and rules change, the calculus changes. Companies optimize continuously for the current environment they find themselves in.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

alephr 7y ago

I agree that there should be action taken to push things like this in a better direction but I think the obvious things to do can easily back fire and just make the situation worse. AFAIK in china there is a lot (not necessarily universal) of support for the government so it would be easy to cast something like this in a way that just bolsters that support (foreign countries trying to hurt china for their own gain) and makes things like this worse. Foreign policy is hard and I don't pretend to know the best way to do it but I think given recent history we have to be more careful about how we try to influence developing nations so that we actually have the effect we want. This might include doing things that could seem unpalatable in the short term.

api 7y ago

Oh yes, this. The Great Firewall is absolutely a trade barrier and I've long suspect that this rather than censorship is its main purpose. It's a way of implementing extremely strong trade barriers (protectionism) while still claiming to be in compliance with the letter of our trade agreements.

oh_sigh 7y ago

The US censors content like child pornography, some bomb making manuals, etc.

ezoe 7y ago

Both US and EU exercise censorship in the name of: + copyrights + trademarks + patents(really bogus patents) + religion(these days, US outright ban any casual religious reference because it offend some believers, resulting modifying some manga/anime/game) + national security + ex-political party symbol(swastika, but they can't tell the difference between nazi symbol and Buddism symbol which is widely used in Japanese commercial products, especially manga/anime/game) + child porno(their definition includes some commercial Japanese manga/anime/game which we believe not possibly be a child porn since it's a pure fiction and no real-life human being harmed). I believe these are also a trade barrier for Japan. But I bet you disagree some of the above points and justify the censorship because it's against your moral based on your culture.

patejam 7y ago
So a couple things (From the US perspective): 1. Copyright, trademarks, and patents are a pretty weak argument for "censorship" IMO. But I guess I see where you're coming from. There are also many "fair-use" exceptions for these that make it less "censorship" and more "preventing profit on other people's ideas". 2. "US outright ban any casual religious reference because it offend some believers, resulting modifying some manga/anime/game" -- Can you give an example? This seems to go directly against first amendment rights. 3. "national security" -- There have been many cases where the government will work with press to attempt to stop them from releasing information that would damage national security. There have also been many cases where the press has not listened, and they're allowed to do that. What specifically are you talking about here? Direct theft of government property/information is illegal, but I would hardly call that censorship. NDAs I guess are censorship, but they are an agreement between two parties, not the government deciding arbitrarily what to censor. 4. "ex-political party symbol" -- absolutely not banned in the US. 5. Okay the last one is a fair example of censorship. I'm not familiar with the US laws on that one and frankly I don't want to find out...
- judge2020 7y ago
  Also, trademarks just had a supreme court decision that makes it so they can't deny "immoral"/"scandalous" trademarks since it was subjective and up to the trademark officer on whether or not something was immoral/scandalous. https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/supreme-court/supreme-court-allows-trademark-f-word-soundalike-n1014796 https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/supreme-court/supreme-court...

aclsid 7y ago

Trade barrier? Since when services offered through the web are paying taxes in the places where they are rendering their services. If anything, expect a lot more governments to wisen up, like the US did with Amazon and taxes, and create these barriers to have people actually play by local rules. That I don't agree with Chinese rules is one thing but it is their country. But let's be perfectly clear that the Chinese did this out of censorship and the trade part happened to be a side-effect.

mankash666 7y ago

China takes such stances on many issues, and flexes it's power. For instance, a private company referring too Taiwan as a separate country can expect severe blowback from China

pteredactyl 7y ago

Unfortunately it seems both countries (or large entities therein: US Politicians, Google, US Media, etc.) are in fact, allied, whether aware or not, with the Communist Party of China. Seems we'd best be served to first collectively realize this. Then do as you suggest.