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Comment by fauigerzigerk | Hacker News Reader

It is unethical because it normalises the worst kind of censorship, the one that is meant to keep illegitimate rulers in power. This is not like other types of censorship that can be criticised and overturned by democratic means, but Google will now conflate the two to justify its actions.

Google not being in China has been a very prominent sign that this is not normal, that the Chinese regime does not speak for the Chinese people and therefore their laws have no legitimacy at all.

Google not being in China has been an ever present pointer towards the fact that Chinese search enginges do not tell the truth.

It is also unethical because Google can now be blackmailed by the Chinese regime, which will affect Google's behaviour towards its users in the rest of the world. This isn't just an ethical concern but also a very pragmatic one.

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Thanks, this is a good argument.

Being from the western world, it is very clear to me what Google's absence from China signifies.

Given that China censors its media, do you think the Chinese citizenry are aware at all about Google's position up to this point, or its symbolism?

It seems to me that the Chinese would not be influenced by Google's absence or presence, since the reasoning is the kind of thing that would already be censored.

I don't know to what extent the Chinese people are aware of it or what range of feelings it provokes.

But the fact that Google isn't there and that Google is almost everywhere else cannot be censored.

At the very least it is (or rather was) an unresolved issue, an open question and the regime doesn't like open questions about its legitimacy.

I think that's important, not just for China itself but also for the rest of the world.

Can't it be censored, though? Isn't that the point? And if it can't be, what are we arguing about?

Somebody told me once that they met a person from mainland China. They showed them a picture of the Tank Man and asked them about Tiananmen Square. The person was dumbfounded and did not know what they were talking about. They tried to say "this is important to you!," but clearly it wasn't, and censorship had worked. This person would have needed much more than a trip overseas to have any interest in it.

I'm not sure why the Google story would be any different. Its symbolic to us because not only are we able to access it, but we go out of our way to make a big deal about it and study it. The fact that this information is available to Chinese citizens when they temporarily leave their country is not enough for it to become important to them.

The symbolism is important to us as westerners. But given that it is meaningless to the Chinese, I question whether trying to preserve that symbolism for ourselves outweighs the benefits that come from working with the Chinese people and providing them with a good product inside of a system that we mutually agree is terrible.

>Can't it be censored, though? Isn't that the point? And if it can't be, what are we arguing about?

I don't know what you're getting at. Explicit criticism of the regime can be censored. Questions raised implicitly by the fact that foreign services are blocked cannot be censored. They remain a thorn in the side of undemocratic regimes.

>I question whether trying to preserve that symbolism for ourselves outweighs the benefits [...]

I know you do, and I strongly disagree.

The benefits of yet another censored search engine, email program or photo app does not outweigh the damage that Google is doing to democracy all over the world by legitimising this particular sort of censorship.

Also, you keep going on about your doubts about the value of that symbolism for the Chinese people. But what about the value of that symbolism for the rest of us who want to live in democratic societies and see democracy strengthened and not weakened?

There were 2 arguments: beacon of truth and avoiding blackmail.

Regarding blackmail I suppose I would say that China already has search engines, which seem to have been able to provide a consistent experience for many years. I would imagine that if there were instances of them being blackmailed, we would have seen the results as drastic product changes or inconsistent experiences.

Since Google does not seem to be aspiring to provide a service that goes beyond that local competition in any profound ways, it seems hard to see why or what they would be blackmailed for, that others wouldn't.

Google has also tried to enter China once and willingly withdrew when it would not cooperate, so they have displayed historically a willingness to exit when the situation is something they cannot agree with.

For these reasons it seems unlikely that a blackmail situation would occur, or, if it did, what it would be for or what it would accomplish.

I'm not sure if this is what constitutes blackmail, but China demanded that all the world's airlines rename Taiwan to "Taiwan China" on their global websites, or they would ban the airlines from Chinese airspace:

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-06-04/qantas-to-refer-to-tai...

Staying out of the Chinese market could make Google less susceptible to the kind of censorship request that is also effective outside of China, like the airlines were forced to comply with.

Chinese search enginges don't have to be blackmailed by the regime as they can simply be orderd to comply. Foreign companies can be blackmailed once their China related business is a large enough chunk of overall revenue and profits.

Your argument about Google's historical willingness to exit is strangely circular, because that is exactly the stance they are now giving up on in spite of the fact that censorship has since gotten worse.

Regarding them exiting, I don't really see what's circular about that if they simply changed their minds about how they perceive the morality of censored results inside if China. It just means they have a line, and redrew it, perhaps depending on new considerations or a new moral perspective. Dunno.

To many Chinese people though, Google not in China is simply a sign that it can't compete with homegrown companies. Many are still drunk on the 厉害了我的国 kool-aid.

I'm sure there is a whole range of sentiments in China toward the issue of censorship and blocked foreign sites. I don't claim to know what exactly those sentiments are or for how many people it raises political questions at all.

But I think that Google's refusal to collaborate with Chinese censors has been an important statement in favor of democracy and freedom of expression that was heard all over the world. Some in China will have heard it as well.

Google's reputation will suffer from this and it will hurt them in a lot of indirect ways, such as hiring, discussions about taxation, competition regulation, advertising rules, privacy laws, developer sentiment towards their platforms, etc.

China has been ruled autocratically for thousands of years. There's nothing to "normalize." It is normal.

We have pretty substantial empirical evidence on the outcomes of US- and Silicon Valley-backed regime change operations in the modern world. They don't work out too well. One could argue that trying to plunge China into civil war is the real unethical behavior here.

Exposing the rulers of a country to criticism by its own people is not exactly regime change by a foreign power.

One party rule is not a prerequisite for avoiding civil war either. On the contrary, civil war is far less prevalent in democratic countries where it is possible to change things by peaceful means.

These are very weak arguments indeed.

The search in other parts of the world is already distorted or full on censored across various "morally acceptable bounds". China just happens to have different morality. This is more akin to McDonalds having a different menu everywhere than it is akin to Orwellian thought policing or that being a universal wrong. The morality is different and ethical is subjective. If you don't like it, don't use it, but to say this is some kind of outright evil imposed by the government is to ignore that the majority of Chinese support Confucian morality and there is little concept of Western style privacy. Why should China abide by Google employees morality? That is the bigger question to me. Why should Google abide by their employees morality either?

I strongly disagree. Political censorship that is supposed to keep rulers in power by shielding them from criticism is categorically different from the sort of McDonald's menu style censorship you're talking about.

Political censorship is meta-censorship if you will. It prevents people from openly debating and overturning other types of censorship or laws more generally.

Rules affecting the decision making process itself are never quite the same as other rules.

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