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Google pulling out of China instead of catering to censorship was a principled move, but fairly obviously did not lead to more freedom of speech in China. It h

Google pulling out of China instead of catering to censorship was a principled move, but fairly obviously did not lead to more freedom of speech in China. It helped kickstart a domestic, government-obedient tech industry. I don't know what the right move here is. Nobody who thinks there's an obvious right answer is worth listening to.

desindol 4y ago
It's a bit of a pickle if someone really finds the right answer and you don't listen to it isn't it?
- bpodgursky 4y ago
  I have no problem with people talking through the tradeoffs and listening. There's tautologically a least-worst option we should find. But if the answer is trite snark that summarizes evil vs obvious good, they haven't done that work, and I won't listen, no.
surfpel 4y ago
Culture moves both ways. I would rather American companies not get so comfortable with blatant censorship. While we do still have some degree of censorship (and a whole lot pf privacy violation), it’s still generally seen as a taboo and not as a moral or necessary thing. Once the social standards change however, the goalpost moves and it becomes harder to maintain the same freedoms we had before.
- norwalkbear 4y ago
  America is divided more than, Iran maybe a glimpse into our immediate future.
- bpodgursky 4y ago
  Should American companies pull out of Germany instead of banning Nazi propaganda? The UK instead of removing court-ordered offensive speech? I mean, maybe, but since the US has the least-restricted speech of basically any nation, you are de-facto asking for a nationally partitioned internet. That's a big change.
  - olddustytrail 4y ago
    > Should American companies pull out of Germany instead of banning Nazi propaganda? That would be a little ironic since it was the US who pushed for such laws in post-war Germany in the first place.
  - 988747 4y ago
    The problem is: if you want to ban Nazi propaganda you have to develop tools to do it. Once you have tools in place you can use it to ban anything you do not like, not just Nazi propaganda.
    - surfpel 4y ago
      Precisely. This is what it means for a company to get 'comfortable' with something. It means that given enough demand they have developed the tools necessary to do that aforementioned thing and those tools now can become accessible to any jurisdiction, even those who didn't ask for it.
    - pjc50 4y ago
      You also have to develop tools to block spam, child porn, and (in practice on almost all social networks) legal porn that there is nevertheless considerable censorious pressure on.
      - fragmede 4y ago
        Or just copyrighted material. Try posting the new Disney movie or streaming the latest UFC fight for free and see what happens. The tools for censorship are there, they just don't count if it's to protect a corporation's assets, for some reason.
- criley2 4y ago
  I would rather the American people elect a government that will protect their rights through laws. Meta will not violate American law. As citizens, our most effective tool is our government of the people. The idea that we rely on culture or corporate benevolence to maintain our freedoms, and not our representatives and laws... it's insane, to the say the least. I'd prefer to elect the people to protect my freedoms, not hope a for-profit advertising company will do so automatically.
  - wahnfrieden 4y ago
    It’s also viable to fight for neither capital or state dominance. You have a lot of confidence in the rule of law applying to power and liberal society
    - junofan 4y ago
      Yeah, wow, laws aren’t code that runs on people instead of silicon.
  - surfpel 4y ago
    You've given platitudes with an overall misunderstanding of both the parent comment as well as a the functioning of the real world. > I would rather the American people elect a government that will protect their rights through laws. I would also like a world where problems don't exist, but that doesn't change the real world. It's a naive take. The world is complicated. > Meta will not violate American law. This is both demonstrably false and borderline meaningless. False because they have and will, unless you're suggesting Meta/Facebook has NEVER broken a law. It's just a question of whether they got charged/sued for it. It's meaningless because laws can be highly interpretable, unenforceable, impractical... and the playing field is constantly changing, so there's always a new opportunity for new types of violations. That isn't to say laws are meaningless, obviously they are extremely necessary and must be enforced, but the public response to those ambiguous situations is what would help determine the next set of laws/norms. > The idea that we rely on culture or corporate benevolence to maintain our freedoms... Parent comment doesn't suggest this. "Corporate culture" has little to do with it. American culture is what would change, has changed, and is changing. When the tooling is developed to carry out efficient, sweeping censorship, it will be used. With more use, we become more comfortable with it and even see it as a necessary evil. Currently there is public outrage when a tech company censors information. How long will this remain interesting enough to draw our attention? TSA in airports after 9/11 is a good example of this.
- ideamotor 4y ago
  Important point. To reiterate, the culture of companies change.
  - surfpel 4y ago
    Culture in general changes. A company is not an island. Employees move around, tech moves around. Society at large gets comfortable with censorship when its use spreads. We're all looking for ways to censor spammers or belligerents from internet forums. It could easily start there and spread to other areas.
    - zmgsabst 4y ago
      That already happened, eg, COVID policies on social media and YouTube. We had a breakdown in our consensus mechanism — because the government partnered with corporations to censor rather than allow public debate. The nation is still bitterly divided.
anvic 4y ago
The right move is letting countries govern themselves in whatever way they see fit and leaving them alone. Or would you like to have Iran or Pakistan or whatever intervening in the domestic issues of the West?
- norwalkbear 4y ago
  People really do think their nations culture should be imposed everywhere. In reality it doesn't work. See Americas bitter defeat in Afghanistan. Which is now more Islamic and antiwestern than it's ever been
  - bpodgursky 4y ago
    > more Islamic and antiwestern It's a massive regression from 2002 - 2021, but this is not true. The Taliban has moderated somewhat from 2000 (somewhat), and frankly would be very happy to make tactical deals with the west to help counter ISIS.
- throwaway83734 4y ago
- howaboutnope 4y ago
  This includes not wanting to support or do business with people who look the other way as people get slaughtered. I'm not in Iran, I'm dealing solely with things that enter my ken and therefore become subject to my judgement. I can't go to a museum, admire the bravery of, say, Sophie Scholl, and then go "ah yes, but at the end of the day it's not really anyone's business", and you cannot both have the dignity of a person who accepts the responsibility they have just by virtue of being human and shut yourself off. At the end of the day, it's just a rationalization for kicking away the ladder. You don't care what happens to them as long as it doesn't happen to you or people you love. That is what it is, and all it is.
shadowgovt 4y ago
FWIW, Google said they pulled out of China for principled reasons but they did it practically for self-preservation. Google got hacked by inside actors planted in their physical offices by the Chinese government. It's one of the very few times that Gmail's security was compromised. At the time, Google did not have the security countermeasures in place to protect against such an attack so they responded by severing the physical ties so such an attack could not be repeated. Once the BeyondCorp initiative had completed and they had the technology necessary to firewall pieces of their infrastructure where users had admin rights from other pieces of their infrastructure where users had admin rights, they reopened business in China because the risk model had changed.
- plantain 4y ago
  >Google got hacked by inside actors planted in their physical offices by the Chinese government. This just isn't true? It was an IE 0-day.
  - shadowgovt 4y ago
    That was one of the tools used. The attackers got access to the Gmail backing store.
    - plantain 4y ago
      That's the tool they used to get in, then they went sideways from the corporate network and eventually into Gmail. I was on the team that cleaned it up...
      - shadowgovt 4y ago
        Correct. The issue was that at the time, simple access to the intranet allowed for such turboing of credentials.
Bakary 4y ago
Those are two very bold claims: that Google pulled out of China for purely ideological reasons, and that the Chinese tech industry would have otherwise failed if they had stayed. We are dealing with hypotheticals here, so it's not like we can back up our propositions with actual evidence. But both ideas just seem deeply unlikely based on what we know of both Google and Chinese tech.
- njdvndsjkvn 4y ago
  not sure why this is downvoted. Chinese companies can definitely make their own search engine. And in fact search engines are not so big in china anyway; everything is an app, and questions are answered on Zhihu. Google's time in China was up anyway and they knew it. It was good PR for them to leave with a bang. Does anyone really thing the CCP would allow Google to collect data on every Chinese person as they do in the US? And without data collection ads become much less profitable (see: facebook). This would also set a precedent of barring Google from data collection which would spread elsewhere. Now its just seen as a domestic Chinese thing only.
snehk 4y ago
> It helped kickstart a domestic, government-obedient tech industry. How long do you think US companies could operate in the US if they weren't government-obedient? Or any company in any country for that matter.
_jal 4y ago
If you want to call Google's act "principled", you need to explain Project Dragonfly. It is and always has been the intersection of realpolitik and greed.

desindol 4y ago

It's a bit of a pickle if someone really finds the right answer and you don't listen to it isn't it?

bpodgursky 4y ago
I have no problem with people talking through the tradeoffs and listening. There's tautologically a least-worst option we should find. But if the answer is trite snark that summarizes evil vs obvious good, they haven't done that work, and I won't listen, no.

surfpel 4y ago

Culture moves both ways. I would rather American companies not get so comfortable with blatant censorship. While we do still have some degree of censorship (and a whole lot pf privacy violation), it’s still generally seen as a taboo and not as a moral or necessary thing. Once the social standards change however, the goalpost moves and it becomes harder to maintain the same freedoms we had before.

norwalkbear 4y ago
America is divided more than, Iran maybe a glimpse into our immediate future.
bpodgursky 4y ago
Should American companies pull out of Germany instead of banning Nazi propaganda? The UK instead of removing court-ordered offensive speech? I mean, maybe, but since the US has the least-restricted speech of basically any nation, you are de-facto asking for a nationally partitioned internet. That's a big change.
- olddustytrail 4y ago
  > Should American companies pull out of Germany instead of banning Nazi propaganda? That would be a little ironic since it was the US who pushed for such laws in post-war Germany in the first place.
- 988747 4y ago
  The problem is: if you want to ban Nazi propaganda you have to develop tools to do it. Once you have tools in place you can use it to ban anything you do not like, not just Nazi propaganda.
  - surfpel 4y ago
    Precisely. This is what it means for a company to get 'comfortable' with something. It means that given enough demand they have developed the tools necessary to do that aforementioned thing and those tools now can become accessible to any jurisdiction, even those who didn't ask for it.
  - pjc50 4y ago
    You also have to develop tools to block spam, child porn, and (in practice on almost all social networks) legal porn that there is nevertheless considerable censorious pressure on.
    - fragmede 4y ago
      Or just copyrighted material. Try posting the new Disney movie or streaming the latest UFC fight for free and see what happens. The tools for censorship are there, they just don't count if it's to protect a corporation's assets, for some reason.
criley2 4y ago
I would rather the American people elect a government that will protect their rights through laws. Meta will not violate American law. As citizens, our most effective tool is our government of the people. The idea that we rely on culture or corporate benevolence to maintain our freedoms, and not our representatives and laws... it's insane, to the say the least. I'd prefer to elect the people to protect my freedoms, not hope a for-profit advertising company will do so automatically.
- wahnfrieden 4y ago
  It’s also viable to fight for neither capital or state dominance. You have a lot of confidence in the rule of law applying to power and liberal society
  - junofan 4y ago
    Yeah, wow, laws aren’t code that runs on people instead of silicon.
- surfpel 4y ago
  You've given platitudes with an overall misunderstanding of both the parent comment as well as a the functioning of the real world. > I would rather the American people elect a government that will protect their rights through laws. I would also like a world where problems don't exist, but that doesn't change the real world. It's a naive take. The world is complicated. > Meta will not violate American law. This is both demonstrably false and borderline meaningless. False because they have and will, unless you're suggesting Meta/Facebook has NEVER broken a law. It's just a question of whether they got charged/sued for it. It's meaningless because laws can be highly interpretable, unenforceable, impractical... and the playing field is constantly changing, so there's always a new opportunity for new types of violations. That isn't to say laws are meaningless, obviously they are extremely necessary and must be enforced, but the public response to those ambiguous situations is what would help determine the next set of laws/norms. > The idea that we rely on culture or corporate benevolence to maintain our freedoms... Parent comment doesn't suggest this. "Corporate culture" has little to do with it. American culture is what would change, has changed, and is changing. When the tooling is developed to carry out efficient, sweeping censorship, it will be used. With more use, we become more comfortable with it and even see it as a necessary evil. Currently there is public outrage when a tech company censors information. How long will this remain interesting enough to draw our attention? TSA in airports after 9/11 is a good example of this.
ideamotor 4y ago
Important point. To reiterate, the culture of companies change.
- surfpel 4y ago
  Culture in general changes. A company is not an island. Employees move around, tech moves around. Society at large gets comfortable with censorship when its use spreads. We're all looking for ways to censor spammers or belligerents from internet forums. It could easily start there and spread to other areas.
  - zmgsabst 4y ago
    That already happened, eg, COVID policies on social media and YouTube. We had a breakdown in our consensus mechanism — because the government partnered with corporations to censor rather than allow public debate. The nation is still bitterly divided.

anvic 4y ago

The right move is letting countries govern themselves in whatever way they see fit and leaving them alone. Or would you like to have Iran or Pakistan or whatever intervening in the domestic issues of the West?

norwalkbear 4y ago
People really do think their nations culture should be imposed everywhere. In reality it doesn't work. See Americas bitter defeat in Afghanistan. Which is now more Islamic and antiwestern than it's ever been
- bpodgursky 4y ago
  > more Islamic and antiwestern It's a massive regression from 2002 - 2021, but this is not true. The Taliban has moderated somewhat from 2000 (somewhat), and frankly would be very happy to make tactical deals with the west to help counter ISIS.
throwaway83734 4y ago
howaboutnope 4y ago
This includes not wanting to support or do business with people who look the other way as people get slaughtered. I'm not in Iran, I'm dealing solely with things that enter my ken and therefore become subject to my judgement. I can't go to a museum, admire the bravery of, say, Sophie Scholl, and then go "ah yes, but at the end of the day it's not really anyone's business", and you cannot both have the dignity of a person who accepts the responsibility they have just by virtue of being human and shut yourself off. At the end of the day, it's just a rationalization for kicking away the ladder. You don't care what happens to them as long as it doesn't happen to you or people you love. That is what it is, and all it is.

shadowgovt 4y ago

FWIW, Google said they pulled out of China for principled reasons but they did it practically for self-preservation. Google got hacked by inside actors planted in their physical offices by the Chinese government. It's one of the very few times that Gmail's security was compromised. At the time, Google did not have the security countermeasures in place to protect against such an attack so they responded by severing the physical ties so such an attack could not be repeated. Once the BeyondCorp initiative had completed and they had the technology necessary to firewall pieces of their infrastructure where users had admin rights from other pieces of their infrastructure where users had admin rights, they reopened business in China because the risk model had changed.

plantain 4y ago
>Google got hacked by inside actors planted in their physical offices by the Chinese government. This just isn't true? It was an IE 0-day.
- shadowgovt 4y ago
  That was one of the tools used. The attackers got access to the Gmail backing store.
  - plantain 4y ago
    That's the tool they used to get in, then they went sideways from the corporate network and eventually into Gmail. I was on the team that cleaned it up...
    - shadowgovt 4y ago
      Correct. The issue was that at the time, simple access to the intranet allowed for such turboing of credentials.

Bakary 4y ago

Those are two very bold claims: that Google pulled out of China for purely ideological reasons, and that the Chinese tech industry would have otherwise failed if they had stayed. We are dealing with hypotheticals here, so it's not like we can back up our propositions with actual evidence. But both ideas just seem deeply unlikely based on what we know of both Google and Chinese tech.

njdvndsjkvn 4y ago
not sure why this is downvoted. Chinese companies can definitely make their own search engine. And in fact search engines are not so big in china anyway; everything is an app, and questions are answered on Zhihu. Google's time in China was up anyway and they knew it. It was good PR for them to leave with a bang. Does anyone really thing the CCP would allow Google to collect data on every Chinese person as they do in the US? And without data collection ads become much less profitable (see: facebook). This would also set a precedent of barring Google from data collection which would spread elsewhere. Now its just seen as a domestic Chinese thing only.

snehk 4y ago

> It helped kickstart a domestic, government-obedient tech industry. How long do you think US companies could operate in the US if they weren't government-obedient? Or any company in any country for that matter.

_jal 4y ago

If you want to call Google's act "principled", you need to explain Project Dragonfly. It is and always has been the intersection of realpolitik and greed.