The world is much larger than just the US, and the interests of one country are rarely the interests of all citizens of the world (e.g. human rights).
Some of the rhetoric I'm seeing fly around on the topic sounds a little overheated to me, compared to how bad things could get.
When you refuse to do business, and "encourage" your allies to do the same, then the other side begins to think that perhaps it may just be easier to take your resources by force.
Based on that, better to be in than out.
Maybe so, but you definitely can hurt human rights by working there. I would say providing censored search results (and putting an American stamp of approval on them) is hurting human rights there. Furthermore, giving an authoritarian government economic leverage over an American search engine company can hurt human rights here.
This is a storm in a tea cup, but it shows that the US feel increasingly insecure when it comes to China.
25 years after Tiananmen, most Chinese university students have never heard of it
https://www.vox.com/2014/6/3/5775918/25-years-after-tiananme...
"Gosh, if only we had known there were no WMDs!" Nothing about the Philippine-American War made it into any history book ever assigned to any student in USA, just as nothing about the liars who killed 600,000 Iraqis ever will. Aware or not, we are still being manipulated.
Having Google censor results could create the false impression that search results are censored similarly in the US as well.
Maybe we can trust Google not to hide stuff from us, but how come the following bullshit is all over Youtube?
"teleSUR is funded in whole or in part by the Latin American government" [0]
First of all, that warning doesn't even make sense. "The Latin American government"? Who's the president in that government? Maybe they have a king? Is that government less reliable than the USA government? Do they fight as many wars? Does the USA government fund any part of any media sources?
More importantly, now that this sort of pathetic annotation has started, wouldn't we expect it to increase? If Alphabet require a complete accounting of all income sources for all video posters, they'll be able to annotate more comprehensively, and then charge on a sliding scale to hide those annotations. Can actual censorship be far behind?
> ...false...
> Maybe we can trust Google not to hide stuff from us, but how come the following bullshit is all over Youtube?
You're going off into the weeds and talking about an entirely different issue.
Google search results in the US are not censored similarly to China's: you can search for Tiananmen Square or Kent State and get accurate results. The kind of thing we're talking about is a scenario where those queries return nothing, or only garbage the supports the party line. The false impression is the one created when a Chinese person cross-checks Baidu against a hypothetical Google.cn and sees no difference in censorship, and makes the error that Google.cn reflects the behavior of Google.com.
We're not talking about poor labeling around who funded what (which is not censorship at all, by the way).