You joke, but I suspect this is part of the changes Google is being forced to make into order to launch the censored China versions.

There are more publicly visible examples [0] of how China pressures Hollywood to make changes to movies in order to release films in China. Even changes to films not released (eg, Change A in order to release B).

I don’t see why they wouldn’t make similar demands to Google, but there’s no way for me to confirm or deny this. Technically it’s pretty hard for Google to prove they don’t censor stuff because of China unless they go fully open data, open source. And they can’t do that.

There are few tech companies that can be trusted. I hope Apache doesn’t break down.

[0] https://www.npr.org/sections/parallels/2015/05/18/407619652/...