If I pretend they left entirely for principled reasons then it shouldn’t matter that the public is too stupid to understand that. I guess I take the position t

If I pretend they left entirely for principled reasons then it shouldn’t matter that the public is too stupid to understand that. I guess I take the position that doing the ethical thing is done because it’s the right thing to do and not necessarily because you’ll be rewarded for it with virtue from the public. I agree that the public’s position on technology companies is often uninformed and contradictory, but I don’t really care about that. If I worked at google I wouldn’t want to enable CCP censorship - not because I expect the public to like me for it it, but because I don’t want to be complicit in the oppression of Chinese citizens. If they regret it and are willing to re-enter and comply then it wasn’t really based on ethics in the first place. That said, I’m pretty sure the hack was the main motivation and the speech issue was just a nice story to tell about it.