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Comment by adjkant | Hacker News Reader

> “I personally am not sure what the solution is for these companies,” said Mr. Rosenzweig. “I don’t see a good answer because the Chinese government is really putting them between a rock and a hard place.”

I don't think this is that hard of a decision, is it? Just say no and cut ties with efforts for China as a market. Any profits there are not worth jeopardizing all of the privacy and precedents that are being slowly pushed.

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“When we hang the capitalists they will sell us the rope we use.”

Because they have a fiduciary duty to, obviously.

Quoting Stalin? Classy. Have any good Hitler quotes you want to share while you're at it?

Just because Stalin was a monster doesn't mean that quote is bad.

Does he have any relevant to the topic in the first place?

Here's one: "The great strength of the totalitarian state is that it forces those who fear it to imitate it."

Stalin didn’t say it: https://quoteinvestigator.com/2018/02/22/rope/

When profits come up against morality, profits will win every time. How do you think we even got to this situation in the first place?

Not just profits. Also influence. Each company wanted to spread it's products globally. Google tried this. But government kept blocking them causing slow internet. The miserable experience plus targeted hacking destroyed their morale for staying in.

Interestingly for Google, it didn't add up to much in terms of missing out. Much like Russia and Yandex, the odds were slim that Google was going to beat out Baidu on their own turf for various reasons. In the case of Baidu, they ended up being a non-threat outside of China. As China gets a lot more aggressive on censorship and content control in the coming years, Baidu's chances of truly going global will dwindle to zero. Lately Baidu has been looking at search as their past, because they know they've lost and hit a wall there in terms of any global search ambition, so they're burning their resources on trying to play in other categories vs Alibaba and Tencent.

Meanwhile since Google was pushed out of China, they have become a near trillion dollar juggernaut. Since fiscal 2009, Google has grown from $23b to $109b in sales. They're about nine to ten times the size of Baidu and growing as fast. That's the cost of being stuck inside of China, while Google is stuck outside of China.

This is not true. There are a bunch of businesses that use there moral positions as advertising to great effect.

This is why Apple doesn't sell away your data, why every city is filled with local and organic restaurants, etc.

The market does select for moral positions, you just might not like those positions.

In that case, though, the moral position is part of what brings them additional profits.

The morality and profits in your example are complementary, not in opposition to each other.

Didn't they just move their Chinese icloud and keys to mainland China? https://www.theverge.com/2018/2/28/17055088/apple-chinese-ic...

"Any profits there are not worth jeopardizing all of the privacy and precedents that are being slowly pushed."

Counterpoint: Scrooge-McDuck-Money-Bin.gif

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