We are Google employees – Google must drop Dragonfly
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Im an engine mechanic by trade, and our shops handle bids for cash strapped local governments that outsource their motor pool maintenance. We do things like fire trucks and police cars, but we were working on a new regional idea as a "service center" for municipalities that purchased MRAP combat vehicles for their police departments. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MRAP
We all, especially the veterans I work with, hated this idea. MRAP's are for combat, not police work, and have a dangerous propensity to roll over in city streets or escalate already violent situations. 14 of us sent a signed letter to the owner and senior management detailing our major concerns and heard nothing back for about a month. Then out of the blue we got a call for a meeting with 3-4 very senior managers at a local irish bar.
They paid for dinner and tried to explain how the business would be extremely lucrative. we would all see major bonuses, we could hire more workers, and grow the business faster than just large truck repair. It took 3 very emotional hours, but we eventually talked down a handful of people from making a very wrong decision.
for a week after, we were all sort of stunned that it actually worked at all. Tire cages meant for MRAP tires were cut up and turned into random parts holders, or as new hangers for air lines...one even replaced our mailbox post.
Collective action. They can hire 14 new guys, but they won't have any to instruct the new employees in their work.
How far is Google willing to go to be friends with China? Mass detainment and ethnic cleansing are well within the realm of possibility, especially in the likely event of an economic crisis.
Will Google help sniff out their Anne Franks? Imagine trying to operate an underground railroad against the full force of Google. There are so many ways that machine learning and modern private surveillance can determine things like if there are extra uncounted people living in an area.
If Beijing did decide to solve the Uyghur problem, would Google cover for them and purge search queries?
No, this is not at all hyperbolic or reaching. American corporations did business with our enemies right up until they were forced to stop during WWII. American machines have been used to commit horrific atrocities. And read Chinese history. Read about what China has done as recently as a few decades ago.
I'm glad to see Google employees taking a break from their virtue pageantry to actually take a stand on something that matters, finally.
[1]: https://www.economist.com/briefing/2018/05/31/china-has-turn...
If Google actually were to do anything to help they Anne Franks of China, do you think they would announce it to the world to debate on HN, or do you think they would do it in secret?
That was very pragmatic. Both sides wins.
I say that fully realizing that not everyone is in the financial position where they can risk a fight with their employer. You can't expect everyone to be Ghandi.
I believe this is key. If more folks at more organizations were brave like this and willing to take the risk, a good chunk of the problems our civilization is facing might be greatly improved.
The most I've ever done is threaten to quit if a project for the RIAA was accepted by my employer when I was invited into the pre-pitch meeting. It just depends on a specific case.
The problem with modern unions, particularly in tech, is that the legacy structure is inapt for current problems. Tech workers don't need a union to negotiate compensation, they're compensated fine already. They don't need a huge bureaucratic structure for engaging in long-term detailed negotiations. They don't need a contract at all.
What they need is a no-dues no-fulltime-union-reps union that operates through direct democracy. It does nothing unless the employer is doing something bad wrong. Then if the majority of the union members vote to refuse, either the employer concedes or they strike.
Because it's not about a thousand little things here, it's about a small number of big things. It needs to be able to address those and then go back to being invisible instead of succumbing to feature creep and destroying the host with overhead and principal-agent problems as we've seen with the auto makers.
I disagree, given the massive cash reserves the tech companies have.
Yes, having a higher salary would be ridiculous in a lot of these cases, but we should moderate that through legislation that benefits the most people - not by a public company further lining the coffers of its owners.
Apple and Google particularly have a lot of cash just lying around, and that cash is the result of the employee's efforts, and they deserve it. I think if we think their salaries are too high in that case, we need to talk about better taxation systems.
They have massive cash reverses because the tax laws have encouraged that rather than paying it to shareholders as dividends. And that level of return is necessary because of the nature of the industry -- you have to spend millions of dollars trying to create the next tech giant before you know whether you've succeeded or not, and most of the time you haven't. The returns to success have to be enough to overcome the high failure rate.
Most of the employees aren't taking the same level of risk. If you work for a company for five years taking home a six figure salary and that company fails, you don't have to give back your salary and in a few months you're working for another company making the same amount of money.
If you think you can do better on your own, risking your own time and money instead of taking outside investment, go right ahead -- but then shouldn't it be you who gets more of the reward if you succeed rather than the people you hire in after you're already an established success?
It feels like what you're saying is that the risk of failing in a startup is massive enough for a founder that they deserve literally billions of dollars.
Could you let me know exactly what risks you think a failing startup founder faces that would entitle them to say, a thousand times more dollars than the average salaried employee? Are you saying that because a founder may go bankrupt they are entitled to thousands of times more money? Does this mean that any individual that takes out a loan larger than their assets to start a business is entitled to thousands of times more money than their average employee? Could you help me understand what makes you think that?
Of course, because the level of risk is different. $100,000 guaranteed is worth more than a <50% chance at $200,000, much less a <1% chance. A very high reward is inherently necessary to offset the very low probability of major success, otherwise people aren't going to do it.
> Could you let me know exactly what risks you think a failing startup founder faces that would entitle them to say, a thousand times more dollars than the average salaried employee?
The less than one in a thousand chance of making that much.
> Does this mean that any individual that takes out a loan larger than their assets to start a business is entitled to thousands of times more money than their average employee?
There are many ways to turn a thousand dollars into a 0.1% chance at a million dollars. Then 99.9% of the time you lose the thousand dollars -- and it's your time/money, not the bank's. Nobody is going to give you an unsecured loan to gamble with.
But if you bet on your own horse at 1000:1 odds and win, how are you not entitled to the proceeds?
Incorrect, that value is only sustained and increased by the efforts of company workers.
> Employer competes with other employers for both a)market share b) hiring employees -bidding up their prices.
Incorrect. Companies that don't have significant oversight in the form of government regulation or strong unions tend to collude to keep salaries low - which is exactly what has happened in the valley, and has meant that these companies have gigantic cash reserves that they aren't leveraging to hire the best talent.
> By comparing gains from entrepreneurship with regular salaries, you are comparing a stock variable with a flow variable.
No, I'm merely saying that the differences and risks suffered by investors and founders versus regular salaried employees are not a justification for the sometimes ridiculous difference between the compensation of the two.
The amount they mutually agree upon. The employee wouldn't agree to work indefinitely for no pay.
The high compensation of successful founders is actually one of the things keeping salaries up, because any of the salaried employees has the option to quit and found their own company. The existing company has to pay well enough to compete with that -- because if what they're paying wasn't actually competitive with that alternative given the relative risk between them, why would anybody accept the salary?
2) It is possible for both to be true at the same time, because the industry is much larger than Apple, Google, Intel and Adobe. Even if they didn't compete with each other, they still have to outbid Facebook, Microsoft, Amazon, etc. -- and pay enough to prevent the workers leaving to found their own companies. It's not unreasonable to expect that the effect on wages was marginal even when it was occurring.
Software one of the highest margins of any industry. They can afford to pay more, especially since they are constantly whining about "shortages" of tech workers.
http://pages.stern.nyu.edu/~adamodar/New_Home_Page/datafile/...
Which is why they already do pay more than other industries.
The best argument you have against that is the anti-poaching shenanigans they've engaged in -- but that's already illegal, so the answer there is a courtroom rather than a union.
How is that different with a union?
> and be willing to risk their reputation
Class action suit or submit evidence confidentially to the attorney general.
> With a union, the onus is on the business to act right, or risk labour action where the SRE folks walk out, and all the little blinky lights turn off.
If Apple won't hire Google employees then the Google employees can retaliate against Apple by not working for them?
The technology needed to let people submit proposals and let other people vote on them is on the level what individuals do over a weekend as adjunct to a side project.
> How do you get the minority in any vote to go along with the result when there isn't any common binding agreement such as a contract that enforces majority rule?
Why do you need to force them to? By definition the majority will already agree, and then many in the minority would participate out of solidarity because that's the whole point of joining a union to begin with. You don't need 100.0%, a large majority is quite sufficient in general. And anything that actually required 100.0% is already lost, because then they could pay off the cheapest defector or contract it out.
And your picture of humam behavior is all too rose-colored glasses if it's having all members of a minority vote just go along out of solidarity when it's non-binding. I've seen unions vote on issues, and it's often contentious with emotions running high on all sides. If the losing side in any of those could have just said "nope" to accepting the result, they would have. Sometimes they try to anyway.
This is a major problem for country-level populations. For corporations it typically comes pre-solved by the corporation itself, because each employee would have a company email address or Active Directory account etc. that could be used for authentication. (In theory the corporation could illegally tamper with the results that way, but the tampering would be immediately obvious to the person whose vote was changed.)
> If the losing side in any of those could have just said "nope" to accepting the result, they would have.
Because they're using the union for the wrong stuff. A lot of the votes would be for things like accepting a policy that gives raises to only senior people. No doubt the junior people being screwed over by that policy would strenuously object when they're the 49%, especially when being in the union deprives them of the opportunity to negotiate something else as an individual.
But how many Google employees have that kind of personal stake in a question like whether to censor search results in China?
The other thing you aren't taking into account is the fact that this boom in the tech industry isn't guaranteed to continue forever. There will come a time, maybe pretty soon, where tech workers will become as precarious as those steel workers and autoworkers eventually became. Big tech companies are already putting a lot of effort and resources into educating the next generation of programmers to provide a more competitive labour market and drive down salaries. There's already talk of a coming recession, where I'm sure the belts will be tightened and people will be laid off. When we have a union, we will be more protected from the inevitable exploitation in such scenarios.
The temporarily embarassed unicorn founders among us need to realise that we are the creators of all the value in these companies and, collectively, we have the power to influence their direction and impact on society. We can help secure not only our own rights as workers but also have the power to change society at large and secure better standards of living for all workers (or non-workers). That's why these recent actions by Google employees have been so important. They can set a precedent for how other companies and even states can safely act in future, without fearing repercussions from their most valuable resource - the workers.
Its one thing to say maybe you'll quit, or skip your pay check for change, its another to actually put your life on the line for what you know is right.
1. Give up their Chinese-Manufactured iPhones/Android Phones? Tablets? Laptops and workstations??
2. Give up watching movies/shows on their Chinese-manufactured TVs??
3. Stop wearing Chinese-made iwatches/fitbits/etc.??
4. Boycott silicon valley startups that have accepted chinese investments?
5. Boycott every product by US/Foreign company (Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Samsung, GE, Disney, Chevron, Exxon, Shell, etc.) doing business in China?
Contracting to build a censored search engine is the moral equivalent of contracting to build a barbed wire fence around a concentration camp.
You're being an active participant that directly assists in making that oppression happen by building tools required for the actual act of oppression, as opposed to building something that merely done in the same country.
We've gone a long way from being serfs who have almost no rights, even the right to read and write.. to citizens who can communicate via the internet.
Advancement in technology will/have make current powers obsolete. Robots and algorithms have been taking more work since the stone age.
Better tools, means more surplus, means more time to think critically, more time to comment over the internet, or read books.
The only problem is that we probably won't see any observable improvement in one lifetime. It is however, also very possible that the incumbent powers put an end to our civilization. Hopefully enough people like these Google employees, Snowden, Assange will be there to stop fascism.
Yes there is more surplus, but where is that going? People in developed societies are working more hours now than they were 100 years ago. Wealth inequality has risen to higher levels than ever existed in modern society. I wish it gave me more time to read books...
We definitely need to be more engaged in resisting these dangerous tendencies, particularly with recent political developments. I think organised tech workers have immense power. If Google employees could formalise their current actions and then even unite with other groups across other companies, they would be a force to be reckoned with.
It only works if everyone goes along.
Be brave and stand up for yourself, what do you have to lose?
+ if they're willing and able
FTFY
(Disclosure: having worked at Google I know some names on that list personally, and respect them greatly. I haven't worked at Google since early 2015.)
[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/273744/number-of-full-ti...
Out of the 88k how many dont care, how many cant afford to care, how many are looking to profit off not caring.
If that were true, then their silence can definitely not be construed as any kind of tacit agreement, or even disinterest.
How many Chinese citizens (or people otherwise susceptible to this purported pressure) work at Google?
There's a short grace period in practice (usually, and this isn't official) if you have another job all lined up that is ready to sponsor you. But if you were an H-1B applying for a green card via your employer, this basically resets your position in line, unless you're in late stages of the process. And keep in mind that the wait is measured in years for many countries (e.g. for India, >9 years right now unless you're in the "exceptional" category).
That doesn't make a lot of sense. I don't see why the USG would want to sanction them, especially since this letter has nothing to do with the USG.
If they're discouraged from signing due to their US visa status, the mechanism that makes more sense is that they fear Google could fire them and it would take them longer than 60 days to line up another job that could sponsor them.
Even as an American with no family in China, I'd be slightly worried that putting my name on such a list might prevent me from getting a visa to visit the PRC. They've shown a willingness to factor politics into visa decisions:
https://www.ft.com/content/b1bd2aec-e333-11e8-8e70-5e22a430c...
That guy didn't even express a stance, like these Google employees have, he just happened to be the acting leader of the club when a speaker the PRC opposed was scheduled to give a talk.
My wife and I once went around and petitioned all 100 people that lived in a condo complex for a specific issue. About 80 people signed. We didn't even need to present the signature sheet - the one hold out on the board we had to convince had caved after learning about the efforts - not knowing the percentage of signers (only we had the number).
I've heard this before. I'm not sure if it's a statistic or just a saying. What's the standard formulation?
Maybe, you meant to say - Gandhi [0] ?
If we're talking about Ghandi, the man that fought for Indian rights (but not for Africans and in fact was a racist against them). And that is probably for the best:
It's interesting you would label this as such.
In what is ostensibly the best country in the world, and a massive proponent of free speech and human rights, you think it's bold to write a letter on the internet to your extraordinarily famous employer?
If it's considered bold in the USA involving Google, I shudder to think about anyone else doing this anywhere else.
In the year 2018 I would hope it's very much not bold to do so.
Free speech only applies to the government though? Your employer is still free to fire you.
Sure you won't be put in jail but for most people losing their job still certainly affects their livelihood.
Your morals are your own? Why do you insist on imposing them on others?
When I say "have no sense of morals," I'm talking about competitors who were acquired by large PE firms a decade or more ago and do not have any internal discussions about the morals of what their employees are building/maintaining. They operate entirely by asking what clients want and then trying to build what they can of those requests.
I'm mostly talking about incentives and market pressures, not "imposing morals on others" or other such emotional nonsense that you are reading into here.
If you leave a morally odious contract on the table (lets say it's cutting up human babies for baby veal) knowing your competitors will take the project, enrich themselves, expand, and develop the capacity to engage in larger, even more odious business, then what's the proper course of action?
Do you cut up babies because fuck morals? Or do you try to get no one to cut up babies? What if you have imperfect information and aren't certain if your competition would do it? What if they have imperfect information about your intentions and decide to take the deal purely on that basis?
Should be straightforward to recognize how corrosive this cycle gets.
EDIT: some people seem to be upset with the baby example. Just exchange that with anything you find clearly morally unacceptable. Like selling reverse mortgages to elderly people with limited capacity, or signing people up for ponzi schemes or adding intentionally addictive additives to a harmful consumable product, etc.
A lot of people have no problem with their countries governments manufacturing and/or selling arms to dictatorships that inflict harm on innocents and supply extremists e.g. UK-Saudi arms trading. As far as some are concerned the UK is just doing what another country may do instead.
What should a police crew use against a criminal equipped with high caliber armor piercing guns?
The Army?
Would it effectively require applying the label "terrorist" or "national security threat" to any criminal who shows they are prepared to use lethal force against a law enforcement officer?
Police have to deal with enough crap that they shouldn't be expected to handle paramilitary situations as well, is what I'm saying.
As a counterexample, remember the "Bundy standoff"? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bundy_standoff That's the kind of situation where the Posse Comitatus Act means you don't send in the Army. However, if they had shot a bunch of people I'm sure they would have had to face at least the National Guard, eh?
Thank you for standing up to this.
Whether people believe unions are a good idea or not, the key is to organize into something that allows people to work together and find common ground to address common problems.
Similarly, if internal morale is in decline and reports come back saying that it's because of X, that also has a real (and quite possibly quantifiable) cost.
While I think the average developer has a more negative opinion of Google these days, for years they have been considered one of the best places to work in the world.
I know if I told my parents, for instance, I had done what you did, they probably would've called me an idiot. :P They just know Google is one of the biggest tech companies in the world, they don't see a lot of their especially recent practices as bad.
To say 'no, thank you, I'd rather not as I don't agree with the company's practices' indicates a kind of moral standing I wish more people would confidently have. It shows you're taking a personal stand against what you believe to be corruption, and that's awesome.
Rock on!
While it is a nice enough gesture, let's not kid ourselves that this was some difficult selfless act on the part of the OP. Apologies to the OP if I have misinterpreted their earlier post but:
> I considered working at Google last year after a recruiter reached out to me
This statement often becomes true by virtue of having a reasonable computer science qualification and living in the Bay Area - eventually a recruiter for a FAANG style company is going to spam you with an email. Actually converting an outreach from a recruiter to you know, an actual concrete job offer at Google, is another matter entirely.
If declining recruiters is the new (very low!) bar for high minded civic engagement, I'm accidentally a grizzled activist on the front line.
Source: have never lived in the Bay Area. Have a large number of those emails in my gmail.
This. I have said 'no, thanks' to FAANG in the last 3 months because my life is in a bit of a flux right now. It was a bit more than a simple 'no, thanks' in case of Facebook, but that's a story for another thread :)
What kind of question is that? No citizen supports all the actions of their government. Government options are a lot more limited than employment options.
It's true that the US government officially recognizes the Beijing government as the legitimate Chinese government and doesn't recognize Taiwan.
OTOH, the US has a security partnership with Taiwan. See https://www.brookings.edu/research/the-united-states-securit... for details of this unique relationship.
I think the moral of the story here is that it's better to sell out from day 1 than to be seen as a hypocrite.
Source? I was not aware there was any hesitation or even disagreement from Apple's side. Is there an Apple statement saying they disagree w/ Chinese government requests similar to the statements saying they disagree w/ US government requests? In their absence, is it safe to assume they agree since they have shown that when they disagree they make public statements?
As of July, these datacenters were nationalized [2], giving the Chinese government access to all Apple user data.
It took only two years to go from refusing the FBI request for one user to handing over the encryption keys to millions of users.
[1] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-apple-icloud-insigh...
[2] https://mashable.com/article/china-government-apple-icloud-d...
If you wanted to do software work for a company that didn't kowtow to Chinese government demands, chances are 99% of jobs are available to you. Does that mean they could if they would? Unknown, and since regimes change with frequency you can't rely on stated principles, only actions.
It's much easier to excel in the pursuit of something you believe in. Seems like folks who accept jobs that they don't believe in are liable to become increasingly demotivated and eventually burned out.
Good for you on making a decision like that.
But... Just so long as you know that someone did take your job there. And they're almost certainly happy to do anything asked. That's something I think many idealistic users here aren't understanding.
If talented engineers were that easy to find, Google wouldn't have participated in illegal wage-fixing; and that's without selecting for engineers that want to support an authoritarian regime. Statistically speaking, every rejection drives up the price. To wield even more power, we'd need to form some kind of industry-wide union.
Because they are actually in China and give concessions to the government.
We should recognize here a very thin line between respecting the Chinese law and actively collaborating to subvert human rights - because the law is defined by an authoritarian regime with a long history of human right abuses.
That being said, surely you cannot change Chinese law from outside China, and if respecting it's current iteration is not in itself an unacceptable violation of human rights, it stands to reason that expanding in China at least forces the government to stick to it's own laws under the threat of a public exit and protest if unlawful pressures are made. It puts ethical companies in a position where they can nudge the Chinese towards ethical behavior - or at least very publicly denounce unethical demands.
Imagine yes, this person would work for Amazon even though they're in China too. Does that make them not working for Google because they're in China a bad choice? I don't think so.
Are we really prepared to tear everyone down who isn't absolute in their morality?
Their logic makes Google a better employer than Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, Facebook and any other tech company currently operating in China. Saying they spurned Google because the company was considering going to China is disengenious, since the majority of the substitute employers are already in China.
There is life outside of the FAANG/GAFAM bubble. If you refuse to work at Google, it doesn't mean that you're then obligated to work at Amazon or Microsoft, etc.
If we're looking at it in that lens, then GP's problem isn't with Google, but with large tech companies in general because that's the industry standard.
The life outside of the FAANG/GAFAM bubble isn't just "small-town software shop[s]." There's a lot more diversity than that, and to conceive of the industry in that way is too parochial.
That is what an economic substitute is. SMB tech companies typically don't compare.
But Dragonfly [ostensibly] went well beyond just censoring results, in that it implemented specific tools like linking search requests with phone numbers identifying people who made those requests. That's straight-up aiding and abetting oppressing people - political opposition, for example, or even unorganized dissenters. I can't believe we are even seriously talking about whether this is okay or not.
I have no basis for saying this beyond not knowing how they could do this otherwise, but I would assume that they must censor results to exist there. I don't know if they go further, such as you describe Dragonfly plans to do.
How can you say this when those that build, even small parts, of surveillance technology are directly contributing to oppression?
Workers absolutely have a moral obligation to what they work on. This notion that they're not responsible for this is horrifically wrong.
Not anymore.
As Google's position becomes increasingly strengthend (with all the market share it can capture in search already realized ~ and it slightly decreasing anyway due to it's slightly tarnished brand), it doesn't need to maintain this illusion of values over profits anymore.
Perhaps similarly to anti-monopoly laws we should also have size caps on companies.
As a thought experiment, I've often wondered the best way to maintain the positive corporate culture that small companies tend to lose as they grow.
It's not clear it's simply growth, or whether it's profits. I wonder if a non-charity oriented non-profit would maintain a better corporate culture.
It's more like regression to the mean; it gets harder to be different as you grow. Good companies get worse, bad companies better (just look at Uber's internal culture).
Since 2005, though, good engineers have had lots of options for where to work, many of which pay better or have more growth potential than Google. And "Don't Be Evil" was a great way to persuade them to come work for Google rather than Yelp or Facebook or some hedge fund, and keep them there rather than have them go off and found their own startups that potentially could compete with Google. Because so much of their product moat depends upon technical excellence, keeping the best engineers within the company is critical for them.
I'll predict that if they don't reverse course on this, we'll see a mini-exodus of Googlers who either end up founding their own startups or start working on political-tech projects. Ultimately I think that may be good for the world, but it's not really in Google's long-term interests, although perhaps at this point their moat is entrenched enough and they're big enough that it doesn't really matter.
Growth probably, but very few actually pays better than Google considering all the perks and work life balance you would get from working for Google. And since the startup boom is almost over, it is even more so like that now...
I think the boom in web & mobile startups is basically over at this point, but there's a new boom in cryptocurrency & AI startups that's just beginning, along with a social movement (multiple social movements, actually) that's just beginning and will likely need communication technology to organize.
You're comparing 2 pre-ipo companies to Google and apple.
Right, but this is different from having higher expected value, or higher likely-case value. Most people don't value compensation offers based on 'growth potential' (aka 'best case').
(I'm assuming you mean growth in the sense of 'growth in value of equity', based on your reply to another commenter)
Come on. A lot of people create startups to do something interesting that they're passionate about. Customers and profit merely serve these ends, not the other way around.
As a society which (hopefully) would like to have some sort of moral compass, how do we prevent large companies from seeking profit even at the expense of our freedoms/health/planet? It seems to me that if the punishment for unethical behavior is economically "less" than the costs or potential losses associated with acting in a good, ethical way, companies will continue to do what we're seeing them do now. My intuition is that capitalism (in its current Western incarnation) can't function without some strict controls to protect what our societies value most.
Or do we simply value profit over everything else? If so, that's kind of depressing, but I get the sense that most people don't think this way.
This might sound weird but some people (and companies) don't subscribe to the notion that money is the only thing that matters.
There is some grey area along strategy short game vs long game, but a company's charter is to increase the value of its shareholders -- THE ONLY THING that literally matters for a publicly traded company*
* Some companies can be setup with a different charter that does not prioritize profit, but google and most of the publicly traded companies on the market today are not those. And it would be very hard to convert to such a company.
It's not to say that the employees don't have some power. Shareholders may play along with their request while figuring out how to maximize the profits and avoid such road bumps as this in the future.
So in the end you have to weigh the wants/needs of the employees and how much money might be lost or gained if you go along with their demands vs how much money can be made or lost if you ignore them.
I could see a argument that upsetting your employees could lead to a value drop that might be greater than whatever contract they are protesting. But it is hard to judge, and it will often only be looked at quarter to quarter.
Now if you give the impression that you are all bout money but don't act like it then shareholders can be rightfully upset. But if you clearly state your values and ambitions and shareholders don't like it? Then, sucks to be them! There is nothing more to it than that.
Serving shareholders’ “best interests” is not the same thing as either maximizing profits, or maximizing shareholder value. "Shareholder value," for one thing, is a vague objective: No single “shareholder value” can exist, because different shareholders have different values. Some are long-term investors planning to hold stock for years or decades; others are short-term speculators.
https://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2015/04/16/what-are-co...
And yes, we can define shareholder value -- its the stock price. But I see your point and why I have talked about the grey area of what is the best move. But you would be hard pressed to find a group of shareholders who who all agree not taking big contracts is going to be the best move.
It will also attract shareholders that share those values and thus going against them will cause an uproar.
Most companies charters talk about their relationship and obligations to the shareholders -- people don't invest in companies that don't intend on increasing in value.
Thanks for a civil disagreement and exchange.
In some cases, the personal priorities can be personal advancement. We see this all the time when managers hire/promote their friends, sexually harass their subordinates, and make decisions on the basis of politics as opposed to technical/business merit.
And in other cases, the personal priorities can be moral values. Values such as promoting free speech, fighting censorship, protecting consumer rights, and avoiding layoffs.
The idea that every single decision taken by a company is perfectly optimized to maximize long term profits, is baseless. There simply does not exist any mechanism to monitor and enforce such a requirement. The shareholders have only one lever to pull: accept the current leadership team, imperfections and all. Or fire them and risk destroying the company in the resulting churn. This gives both the executives and employees tremendous leeway to prioritize values over profits, as long as they are good enough to not get fired.
Hell, this entire post exists because some Google employees care more about their values than about making as much money as possible.
I can assure you if google employees revolt on a number of projects and that drops the stock price in half over the course of 3 weeks PEOPLE WILL CARE... Even the ones that today you say don't care.
There are an awful lot of people in this very comment thread who would claim to be counterexamples to this. Are you going to say they're all lying or deluded about their own motivations?
What an absurdly preposterous thing to say. Money is a motivator and a large one for many, many people, but it's ridiculous to call it the sole motivator for everyone.
There's the consideration of true values. Then there's the consideration of lost opportunities from following those values. Then there's the cold consideration of the money gained from PR boost due to following the values. Then there's the "game theory" consideration of altogether dying in the marketplace if your competition don't act on those values.
I think the best thing for all of us to do on the outside is to create a culture where every company benefits from the PR boost. Google executives are one concentrated interest, separate from Microsoft, etc. The employees, I reckon, are not as financially motivated (i.e. don't stand to lose _as_ much individually) and can afford to advocate their values. It seems to me (I'll phrase it conservatively, since I'm just throwing out ideas here) that Google employees should make friends with Microsoft employees to make sure they raise the same noise on their end as well. Make it okay for each company to gain (monetarily or otherwise) from good PR, and make it less profitable for all of their competitors to sell out.
People should be made aware that there's a filter and all searches are made available to the government.
That said, they need to be rewarded for moving or a boycott wouldn't help anything.
China is already the second largest economy and their goal is to be a world leader in AI by 2025. China isn't going to be left out of anything.
But Facebook can influence elections. Something isn't adding up to 100% here.
More so, I'm not worried about Google influencing China, I'm worried about China putting pressure on Google to spy on the world or lose potential profits.
Wrong. The government’s Just is to protect life and liberty and ensure a legal framework for the enforcement of contracts. It’s just is most certainly not deciding what is best for people. Protect my rights and otherwise stay out of the way.
That's exactly the issue people have. Censorship. No one should be deciding what others can search.
Google has already provided China with a product: uncensored search. If the Chinese (for the sake of argument, naively assuming that the CCP acts on behalf of its citizens) don't think that's what's best for China, fine. They don't have to use it.
You do realize that the "people" do not have a voice in China right? It is not a democracy...
The Chinese had a century or more of bloody civil war recently, within historical terms. They don't like regime change.
They historically were fine under the emperor, who was authoritarian. They are use to autocratic, central government. Unless things get extremely bad, I don't see them thinking that democracy is better than their current stability. If Xi Jinping does a decent job of getting rid of corruption and improving the air quality, I doubt you'll see a revolt even with a depression in China.
Edit: for those downvoting, how about a dialog? Democracy is not a native idea for the Chinese. Their major philosophical systems support a rigid hierarchy, which is not compatible with the democratic norm of anyone can attempt to run for office. They've lost millions to wars before Mao calmed everyone down. Even with Mao's major famine, there wasn't a revolt. 45 million died, and no uprising. If 100k died at the hands of the US government, there would be blood in the streets. Probably true with 1k. The Chinese do not care about authoritarianism.
Democracy is no more a native idea for western culture; 250 years ago every state was a monarchy, and political ideologies based in hierarchy still regularly win elections.
Also, you cannot use the word "choice" when no options were ever given. A large chunk of people can be unhappy with how the government operates while still not marching the streets. The world is not binary. People living in China also know that the government went to extreme lengths when it came to ending protests in the past: shooting at their own citizens.
Here are some other factors to consider:
- Does it soil our hands to build the "Mental handcuffs" of China, even if Baidu started it?
- Does it stop at China? Or what about Turkey? Iran? Would we build a search in Saudi Arabia that didn't let women look up divorce if the government wanted it?
- Does it come to America? What about searches that seem criminal?
This disagreement is much more fundamental than China. It's about the role of free-information and free-education being the basis upon which beliefs should be formed, rather than beliefs being used to block out free-information.
Maybe google should commit to a policy of "protected free speech" on a wide range of political topics that it will never censor in any country (roughly in line with the first amendment).
Great idea.
And that sounds reasonable. I hate FUD-spreading around e.g. immigration, but I don't support any censorship around it. Just debunk the FUD, hiding it won't solve anything, and might hurt a lot when some people get "redpilled" by discovering censored opinions.
China wants to censor its own human rights violations, I think there morally bad. Certain EU Nations want to prevent fat right nationalist radicalization via censorship. I think that's clumsy, but good.
So hence "why single out China." It stops whenever the employees put up a fight. Isn't that the point of integrating a company-wide value system? You want to mimic an individual value system, in that you are clear on why you made certain decisions, because you can point to your value system?
But, who will be deciding what is considered as ultra-nationalist? Some liberal government that might be overly corrupt and is about to lose the election could just label their political opponents as modern day Nazis and have them be censored on Google search. For example Germany treats the AfD as a far-right party, but in other countries they would be centrist at best. There is no middle ground, because morals wary from individual, we might try a consensus, but that would destroy individual rights. To me it seems that it's best to have a censor-free search engine, perhaps only censor stuff that is related to illegal activities or terrorism, but make everything else be publicly available.
That is an "example" of an "overly corrupt" government that labels them far-right, because they would otherwise have lost an election to them? What speech of the AfD got censored in any shape or form?
Yes, in other countries what is considered far-right in Germany is considered centrist. Those countries also consider what we consider centrist as leftists. So? They're a German political party, they will get judged by Germans, on the grounds of German history, thankyouverymuch.
> perhaps only censor stuff that is related to illegal activities or terrorism
So basically, back to square one, since you haven't really solved the problem of who defines that and how (which we do actually over centuries, it's not a problem to not have it solved once and for all perfectly, right now -- if anything the problem here is the misunderstanding that this could be possible), achieving nothing other than claiming that the AfD isn't far-right.
Presumably legislatures, that are elected? I'm not sure how it works over there.
>Some liberal government that might be overly corrupt and is about to lose the election could just label their political opponents as modern day Nazis and have them be censored on Google search.
Well, that's happening in America right now, the executive branch is labeling his opponent political party as Communists, don't respect rule of law, saying they want Open Borders or to "Take the Guns Away!" despite the fact that this is factually incorrect. In the USA, we have several branches of government that helps balance when this happens - for example, our judicial branch recently restored the press pass of a journalist removed for being a thorn in the executive's side. I imagine a balance is similarly struck in these European nations? They are all democracies, right?
It seems very much an age of free flow information and rule of the people. Despite the warning-flag-waving of the alt-right in the USA that labeling people nazis will somehow cause totalitarian liberal rule, it really seems like the opposite is happening - far-right nationalism seems to be on the attack for totalitarianism, with the democratic systems keeping it at bay.
I am very interested in discussing this further, however, because I don't believe it's a simple, black and white issue, and I am curious if there's ways to prevent bad things like far-right nationalism without restricting speech (which, the argument goes, could backfire).
Democrat Rep Eric Swalwell advocates for a complete gun ban: https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/this-democratic-c...
So, your claim that it’s factually incorrect, is incorrect.
How about I said to you that all men are descendants of Genghis Khan? Well, 1 in 200 are, and Eric Swalwell is 1 of the 198 Democrat representatives (though that percentage gets much lower if we lump in total Democrats in elected office...) http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/gnxp/2010/08/1-in-200-men-...
My claim that the president's factually incorrect statements, are factually incorrect, remain unchallenged in any rhetorically effective way, though I invite you to try again if you please.
But why don’t they apply the same censorship to the far left? That’s where I have my problem with it, it isn’t to protect the people from the far right, it’s to control public discourse in a way that reinforces their leftist ideology. The Communist Party isn’t censored in Europe, but right-wing groups are. You can celebrate Stalin, but would be arrested for celebrating Hilter. How is that any different than Chinese censorship? Maybe degree, but definitely not intent.
It's almost, but not quite, false equivalence. You could make a moral relativism argument, but at the end of the day the global zeitgeist is moving towards the "good" that some people associate with liberal values, and always has been.
From an anthropological standpoint, I'm with you - the ideologies are indistinguishable. From a moral standpoint, I disagree strongly - one is generally Bad, the other is generally Good.
The best would be to just admit that Europe is wrong in censoring stupid far right (Nazis), while mostly ignoring stupid far left (Commies).
But some people liked the pseudo-communist regimes, while almost nobody liked Nazi occupation (which is still in fresh memory). So the opposition to banning Commies is real and noticeable. So not so simple.
Tl;dr: Simplified "moral standpoint" holds no water in these discussions.
It's literally both the biggest player and the biggest threat to freedom in the world.
That's a good place to start.
Those are differences in kind, not just degree.
If censorship existed in the USA, Google would have still started under it, and simply operated with that constraint. This is no different than operating in China.
Google can't influence one way or another what censorship laws exist in China, currently. If they had a significant market share there, then they might be able to negotiate terms, since they would have some leverage.
>If censorship existed in the USA, Google would have still started under it, and simply operated with that constraint.
"If the US were just like China, we'd be in no position to criticize them" - sure, but it isn't. The USA and the PRC are not the same, and I don't think it's a relevant hypothetical.
I seem to recall that anything about Nazis is censored in France. I believe selling Nazi stuff on eBay is forbidden, for example.
But I haven't heard about this in a long time, so this may not still be true.
Comments like this make me glad I live in the USA. We don't discriminate on what types of censorship are acceptable or not. Less extraordinary exceptions (Child pornography, Libel), any censorship is in violation of our constitution and most closely held core values.
>I'm sure the Chinese would say exactly the same thing that the EU does about their system; it "protects" individuals from what they don't need to know.
I'm sure they would. I'm also sure that Donald Trump would say that he's not a liar. That doesn't mean it's an argument we need to take seriously. You can make judgments for yourself - I believe that the EU leadership is more or less acting in good faith (and is likely to continue doing so), and the CCP is not. That's a meaningful difference.
It doesn't matter what the Chinese government says, because if they say something like that they're lying. Their censorship is meant to protect the power and privilege of the already powerful and privileged, and keep everyone else complaint to them.
The only way Chinese censorship "protects" individuals is by discouraging them from having dissident thoughts that the government may decided to personally and physically oppress them for having.
Nazism is despicable, but censoring the Nazi voice is effectively the same as preventing citizens from having those "dissident thoughts" that contradict modern western government, and you actually can receive prison time for expressing Nazi sentiments in Germany so the government absolutely does "oppress them" for having those thoughts.
China views western influence the same way. In China's history, rule by the west has seen terrorism, imperialism, and corruption, which have lasted far longer (since the 1800s when the First Opium Wars were fought), and I would argue have led to greater suffering (certainly the numbers are in favor of this being the case).
Accepting government censorship in the EU is, in principle, no different from censorship in China. The only difference is the flavor.
For the record, I support neither.
My guess is that it is already here, just for things we deem acceptable. The problem with censorship is that everyone has something they think acceptable to censor, so the infrastructure to censor will be developed with mass approval.
Also, as China requires more surveillance infrastructure to be built for Chinese google, that can bleed over to western google. Let's say Google starts to enhance China's social credit score system with users search behavior. It's easier for western governments to point to these capabilities on China's Google and request for them to be instantiated in their own countries.
It won't really help them, and focusing on the Chinese market misses the most insidious problem: a censored Google search engine in the PRC gives the Chinese Communist Party leverage over Google outside of the PRC. Just look at what happened with the airlines: the PRC forced them to change their foreign websites to reflect a PRC political positions by threatening their access to their market.
Think of what they could do to "uncensored" American Google with similar leverage:
* Chinese human rights websites are deranked from relevant searches down to the second or third page. This is a subtle and deniable type of censorship.
* Ditto with critical coverage of Tibet or Xinjiang.
* Taiwan is shown on Google maps and infoboxes as part of the PRC.
* Google gives Xinhua, the PRC's English-language propaganda outlet [1], prominence on Google news.
* etc.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xinhua_News_Agency#Bias_&_poli...
But I agree with the core point - the 'legal' influence would bother me just as much.
> and purely ideological.
Umm. Is that not _the_ point? OP disagrees with China gov't ideology so hard, that it just can't support it (the ideology) in any direct way?
I'm totally against censorship. But I also don't agree the those who see themselves stand on the moral high ground while don't understand the complexity of the issue. Also a lot of people don't differentiate facts and opinions. They blame those who don't agree them are influenced by China government.
> We are Google employees and we join Amnesty International in calling on Google to cancel project Dragonfly, Google’s effort to create a censored search engine for the Chinese market that enables state surveillance.
> Our opposition to Dragonfly is not about China: we object to technologies that aid the powerful in oppressing the vulnerable, wherever they may be.
And where's the actual research showing that Google in China would do such a thing? By all calculations, it would bring more knowledge and access to Chinese citizen that they already have.
This make it sound like Google is the reason why the citizen don't have access to information.
Google has agreed to remove plenty of stuff from the search engine that many Europeans see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_by_Google
Sounds like double standards to me.
Search engine advertising constitutes close to 85% of Google's revenue. And unlike Project Maven, which was ended due to internal resistance from employees, doing business with the second largest economy in the world isn't an expendable venture.
Curious to see how they move forward. My guess is they will: human outrage never really lasts long, especially when their livelihoods are far from in jeopardy.
You assume that the government would ever let a foreign company get dominant market share over a domestic one.
China is no where close to a free market, the winners are chosen.
Reading a bit about the Belt and Road Initiative is probably a good primer on some of China's global interests right now.
Google is dominant nearly worldwide. If China is able to get Google to cave and build the censorship machine then what barrier is there to turning the feature ‘on’ for other countries that ask for it? There are plenty of oppressive regimes interested in a censored Google but they don’t have the pull to get Google to build it right now. Once it’s built though why wouldn’t Google’s response just be shrugs “sure why not?”
I think it is indeed a slippery slope and legitimizes China’s plan to influence the internet for the worse.
Remember all of the handwringing about BBM messages being difficult to intercept? Then the crying suddenly went away, and a few months later you heard about police breaking up organizers of riots.
Google could continue to operate profitably without doing business in China, so what makes your statement true?
China may be the lowest-hanging fruit of the search and ad market, but surely you're not suggesting Google would shy away from a challenge and only go for the easy win? That doesn't sounds like the Google we all know.
People want a messenger app? Let's make one! Oh, it takes time and energy. Let's shut it down. Oh wait, people want a messenger app. Let's make one. Oh, it takes [........]
It's all about returning as much money to investors as possible. Period. Otherwise you suffer the consequences.
AMZNs stock price isn't driven by current earnings, but it isnt driven by investor magnanimity either. It's all about the promise of future earnings. If revenues flatline or decline, you can expect their stock prices to fall in line with their peers.
Why doesn't Google start a restaurant chain, or start making PCs, or selling servers, or licensing software defined networking stacks to other companies, or monetize many of their other assets? Surely they must if they're supposed to make as much money for their investors as possible?
Why don't they sell search data on individuals to repressive regimes, so people can be hunted down, imprisoned, tortured and executed? Would make some decent coin for investors, I expect, lots of repressive governments would probably pay a pretty penny for it.
How about selling searches emanating from US government IPs to the Kremlin, selling tracking data linked to Google accounts, or otherwise monetizing espionage interests?
The problem with doing these things is that it affects the value of the Google brand, both internally to employees and externally to customers. If you can't hire the best employees or encourage customers to trust your software and services, then long or even short term decline is pretty much assured.
And how about swapping cause and effect? You're positing the tail should wag the dog - that the stock market should control what the company does. How about the stock market chooses to invest in companies that are doing things that it believes will make money? From this perspective, the company is free to do whatever, and investors are free to sell the stock if they don't agree. In truth, there's a mutual dependence here - the company can't just fraudulently give away investors' cash, but likewise, if investors knew what was best for companies, we wouldn't need CEOs or leadership of any kind - we'd just advertise choices to the investors / market and go with whatever pushes up the stock most.
The general legal position today is that the business judgment that directors may exercise is expansive. Management decisions will not be challenged where one can point to any rational link to benefiting the corporation as a whole.
They just keep getting picked off one by one.
The best way for the world to improve is for all scientific and technology advancements to be freely available.
Any good China does for its people or for other nations? That will just serve to legitimize their totalitarian government and encourage imitations abroad. Ergo it's bad.
In general it's better to state your fundamental premises at the beginning of the argument rather than reveal them midway through
But still, not sure if they would give up the low cost of manufacturing for this. Frankly, the regime makes that possible.
Isn't companies banding together and agreeing to restrict business in a market a combination in restraint of trade, which is explicitly illegal?
You can't be serious. Don't ever underestimate brand inertia, especially in a "super-patriotic" country like China. If Google had any chance at all, and assuming the Chinese government or Baidu's friends in the government wouldn't interfere with the "free market" in China to hurt Google at every turn, it would still take at least 5-7 years for Google to even get close to Baidu's market share.
Also this assumes this wouldn't catch a fire under Baidu's ass to start innovating and investing more into its search software and server farms.
I still believe it would be all but impossible for Google to beat Baidu in China. I just don't ever see it happening. If it was so easy, why hasn't even happened in Russia, where Google actually had significantly larger market share, had to deal with fewer political games than in China, and its Chrome browser I think was actually the most popular there until recently (or it may still be the most popular there).
If Google can't beat Yandex, it absolutely can't beat Baidu, no matter how much it "complies" with the Chinese governments' rules.
OTOH Chinese consumers are recently obsessed with western products actually. Not with iPhones (you can buy Xiaomi smartphone, laptop, and Bluetooth headset for the price of iPhone), but with clothes, food, and many other goods.
> If Google can't beat Yandex, it absolutely can't beat Baidu
Don't underestimate Yandex.
You completely missed the point and failed to address any of the serious ethical problems they raised in the letter. We would be living in a dark dystopia if everyone's biggest priority was penetrating markets.
Tech workers are in high demand and have great salaries. Their livelihoods are not in jeapordy; they have their pick of where to work.
Look, I am a huge Google critic, you can view my past posts, but a lot of what employees are complaining about seems pretty laughable, unattainable and shows a lack of maturity. In my estimation, Google's power struggle between making money and its employees creeping political stances is and has been unsustainable. I think censoring results in China is one thing, but there are so many other cultural problems at Google that honestly just don't belong in a corporate environment. Google has long been seen as a playhouse, and has let employees be too dramatic and vocal about politics as well. In a normal company, it is -not- normal to have a sit down after an election to baby sit staff members, and offer grief counseling.
So while, yes Google certainly has some problems with "values," I think there are two problems, not just one. It's not so much that leadership has moved to drive profits no matter the cost (Google has long done that!) it's that while that is still happening there has been a shift in the company's politics. Again, I'm not talking about the Chinese censorship itself, I want Google/Microsoft/Facebook etc to not empower Xi. But it's all the other stuff going on that just seem so counter productive, not only to culture but to profits.
Situation around firing of James Damore. Not even the firing itself as the (imo!) manufactured outrage that caused it.
From (not only) my PoV it was quite extreme, and quite disconcerting. And I consider myself a very left-leaning person.
This is exactly it. A lot of people who genuinely loved technology, programming, were nerdy, etc long left the company. Could just be an arrogant of becoming big, and selecting for physical attribute diversity.
Only from the very narrow perspective of current US politics - just normal in the mainstream West.
There is clear shift away from extreme social liberalism, and denying that just convinces people that shift is necessary. Even when it might have disastrous consequences for the economy ...
California isn't that progressive.
why not? not all companies should be money over everything. And google is still doing fine and turning on huge profits based on the work of these "liberal babies".
Opposing sexism is not a partisan position.
Attempting to reframe these sorts of things as “lefty silliness” and paint them with the same brush as being sad and disappointed that a rapist won the election is simply subterfuge.
Calling military paid murderers is definitely a partisan thing. What else do you propose? Someone has to do the dirty work to keep the citizens safe.
> Opposing sexism is not a partisan position.
Are you talking about harassment cases. Have you been to Google or talked about it to a Googler? It generally is swift and works without any proof. What they are asking is anonymous complaint system and things like that, which can definitely have two thoughts.
What about Google giving huge advantage to women in hiring. Just one verified anecdote, in kickstart, which google uses to hire in Asia Pacific, men do get a call for interview within rank 50, many time lesser than that. And they have definitely called women if they got rank 1000, likely even more.
How exactly did US operations in Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Nicaragua etc. keep you 'safe'?
Which would be true of any military force that invaded, slaughtered hundreds of thousands and then pulled out leaving a power vacuum.
The US didn't go into Afghanistan to save people from car bombs.
If the US has somehow done you a favour as a result of its wars of aggression, it's a complete coincidence.
> It's not easy sleeping when a car bomb just went off outside your house and it was targeted at you for not being a religious hardliner..
Sounds like Iraq and the rise of ISIS doesn't it? Another US war of aggression that left hundreds of thousands dead along with a power vacuum filled by religious extremists.
The fact that people might now be clamouring to have them back after they left a power vaccuum to act as blocker on warlords and religious zealots fighting for control doesn't change that fact.
> nything else is just a naive world view. I was like that when I was in my early 20s, then I grew up and realized how complex the world really is.
Implying that I'm immature because I disagree with you doesn't make you look as good as you think.
Can you just recite the number of American civilians killed due to terrorist attacks after 9/11 and compare it with how many terrorists have seriously threatened and even died to kill Americans. If someone is ready to die to kill less than one person on average, it needs to be taken seriously.
While, yes there are things which every military mishandles from time to time, certainly US, you are calling out all activities, for which I hate to say it but you are too naive.
Support your claim, unless you think that using objectively true statements marks one as a non-conservative, which is blatantly silly.
"immigrants are taking away jobs from our people"
"Israelis are murdering Palestine children"
"Palestines are murdering Israeli children"
"Donald Trump is a liar"
"Hillary Clinton is a liar"
Maybe not 100% "partisan", but I hope you get why I don't consider your "argument" persuasive.
No one claimed otherwise.
> Declining to work with paid murderers is not a partisan position.
I think your statement speaks for itself. I suppose everyone in the military should just be thrown in jail, since they are just murderers. There is no "good" use for military. I'm sure you also blame the US for all of the world's problems. The world would live in tranquility were it not for the evil US military.
Unfortunetly I dont think executives will give a slightest heck about this article..
Ah. A believer that software engineers are cogs and can just be “replaced” without training and learning of code bases.
Hiring software engineers, bringing them up to speed, and having them contribute to production features, is expensive. Also, you’ll never truly recoup the lost knowledge that goes.
It may be true that in some companies, engineers are treated as cogs, but this line of work is _heaven_ compared to those other industries.
Does Google care about this cost? Hard to say from the outside. But for every signature on this you can bet there are many more inside being very vocal. One part of Google's culture is that it encouraged feedback from the engineers and the engineers take advantage of that freedom pretty frequently.
They invest extremely heavily in minimizing attrition and widening their funnel for recruiting. That's why their offices are crazy, they do 3 meals a day for employees, they pay a ton of money for people right out of college and for interns, everyone gets free massages, etc. They take any effect that narrows that funnel or increases attrition very seriously, as they view the company as fundamentally being a stable of the best software engineers they can get competing with the best software engineers other people can get to put out better solutions to problems.
All that said, I commend the folks who signed this letter. If anything, the fact that most of the folks who signed are in relatively junior positions shows how Google has lost its way when it comes to it's morals. The more senior execs feel the pressure of serving Wall Street and have more to lose, while these more junior folks, while taking a risk know they can get hired anywhere else in a heartbeat. It's the kid standing up saying the emperor has no clothes.
The fact this is posted on HN and the regular gauntlet of tech sites is enough to have a major impact on their recruiting. I, like many of the people here, am a frequent target for Google recruiters and Dragonfly is more than enough for me to turn down an interview with them. Maybe they will have more luck with fresh college grads and interns who are less discerning.
In other words, every single person who is not a software developer, especially anybody in any form of "management"?
I don't have strong views either way on Project Dragonfly but I would absolutely be greatly pissed off if everyone opposing it were fired.
Worst thing that can happen here from Google's perspective is for this to get a lot of media attention & a lot of signatures.
Do they think that everybody in China cares that their internet is censored or that they're being watched? I'm pretty sure if there was a poll conducted inside China to choose between censored Google vs no-Google almost everybody would choose censored Google.
It's not like a person who's opposing the Chinese government online is going to be using Google without a secure connection anyway. For the rest, you're providing a service that is significantly better than what they're currently being offered.
but it's another thing as a Google employee. I assume that working towards a censored product and passing on user data to the Chinese government is opposed to the values of a lot of Googlers. developers do have a choice.
How can you say something like that? What does "oppose" mean to you exactly? Being the leader of a 1 million-strong protest group? If so, then yeah, I would expect such people to be very careful about how they protest online.
But everyone else? Come on. Most people, even most dissidents, are not tech-savvy. There even was a recent story about NYT whistleblowers sending classified data to NYT via WhatsApp, without ever making the connection that their phone number used in WhatsApp could be linked to them.
The vast majority of people aren't infosec experts.
Although this is true my personal experience is that in non-democratic societies there is a huge overlap between people who are tech-savvy and dissenters, you just don't pump into an article about the Tiananmen Square massacre, you actively seek it and you understand the risk behind looking for something like this.
I'm not saying they're world-class experts but they'll at least know to use a VPN.
You can't isolated them but neither you can fully accept their conditions. Maybe the google employees decision will put other options on the table.
It's practically a given that China will eventually demand this of Google, which means that Google has presumably already evaluated this possibility and decided to go into China anyway.
I think it would be better than the current situation, where Chinese people are left with a poor quality search engine, which won't find a good answer to the question, report them to the government, and do it in a very secretive way.
2) optics of doing this after saying no to project maven for US intelligence
3) the very real risk that if google is successful it will create leverage for the Chinese government over google services. The Chinese government can say give me that gmail account of a Chinese dissident and former citizen or lose 20% of your market.
We live in a free market democracy, how about we respect that from time to time.
I wonder if they are going to refuse their stock based compensation?
That said, having worked at Google there are many folks who were there prior to this shift (and unwittingly assisted by doing nothing previously). I don't blame them for trying to correct course and actually hope they can do so while remaining at a workplace they have spent so much time and effort developing and integrating within.
It's another thing to work at a company which has decided to aid a government on the other side of the world that's forcibly relocating a million religious minorities to re-education camps.
(Cue the China apologists!)
There is probably more than one kind of profit. I think that if you've got a mortgage on a SV condo or house, and made plans for your financial life based on your income without knowing what the company you work for was or would be up to, you may be in a pretty good position to say that it's okay for you to accept a salary as you protest the action or actions of the company. Not to mention, strikes or other means of civil (commercial) disobedience might have more of an impact than simply leaving. By placing the onus on Google to fire you, you have PR and legal leverage (wrongful termination, if your moves are careful (IANAL)) to change the situation, whereas if you leave, you just go quietly into that good night, and the situation is guaranteed to continue. Complicity isn't always a black and white matter.
> I wonder if they are going to refuse their stock based compensation?
Stock-based compensation, I imagine, is on a vesting schedule. The same discussion as above applies, except that some of that compensation represents value that may be notionally "clean," having been earned outside the scope of the bad acts, either temporally or organizationally. It also represents earned compensation. Finally, its refusal would only serve to enrich Google, the ostensible bad actor in this instance.
However, what sickens me most about the OP's drive-by rhetoric is its reflexive turn toward reactionary complacency. It seems to say that those without sin only are allowed to cast the first stone, but really universalizes something like original sin to justify complete complacency. Further, it ignores the power imbalance between employer and employee, and minimizes the bravery of those who are speaking and acting out against injustice. It's despicable.
I bet you anything if people at Google who are protesting were really afraid of losing thier jobs, not as many would be protesting.
If anything, you should be urging your moral friends and coworkers to go to Google.
Suggestions that those who think that Google is going down a dark path should leave will just result in moral evaporative cooling, which leaves everybody off worse.
Signing a piece of paper knowing that it is of no personal risk to you is virtue signaling.
Why should that get a company to change? What will be the consequences if they go ahead with thier plan? A more harshly written letter?
The clear implication is that these people will quit the company if Google goes forward with Dragonfly.
A more fair comparison would be asking if employees would be willing to have their stock decrease in value 10% in exchange for their company being more moral. I expect many employees would take such an exchange, although not all.
Or is it "all privilege, no responsibility"?
To be honest, Google might even prefer they quit. They could then just be sure to hire more amenable people in the future.
might wanna check this out(and their other debates).
Go get involved in crypto and find some projects that are actually building stuff instead of pumping the price. That's the historical analogy - IMHO we're right about at 2002 in the cycle, after the new technology bubble bursts but before anyone knows who the winners will be, or if they even exist. If you're successful people will hate you anyway because that's the nature of success, but at least you can get a decade or two of feeling like your work means something in before that.
People are fooling themselves if they think any for-profit company doesn’t put profits first.
is it the huge quantity of computing resources behind their search engine? (wouldn't Baidu or other Chinese companies be able to easily outbuild Google?)
is it the incredible, mysterious superiority of the super-duper secret Page Rank algorithm? ( jk )
is it the sophisticated and complex home page design and superior google doodles?
i mean what is it exactly?
google won't be able to reach the monopoly level of market share it enjoys in the US search market so it would actually have to compete on a month to month basis for its very life. this means it will hire a lot of very hard workers in China. and that means google's secret sauce (if it even exists) will make its way out and into the competitive landscape before Google can get close to being a monopoly. it just seems like a losing game.
So are they playing both sides? Or trying to con the Chinese government? Or just a large and loosely coordinated organizarion?
1) https://blog.digitalocean.com/digitalocean-outline-jigsaw-vp...
So, the logic of this protest is that Chinese people do not deserve even incremental improvement, a huge improvement by the way, in their lives?
Can you give some examples of this?
Google has to comply with the laws of the countries they operate in. And in fact Google has been nothing but transparent in the requests they got.
And yes, that’s why they pulled out of China in the first place, because you can’t operate against the law.
I haven’t seen other software or hardware companies pulling out of China. Microsoft and Apple are certainly happy to do business there and nobody condemned them for it.
Microsoft for example was accused of censoring Chinese search results in Bing globally.
Mind you, that other companies are as bad or worse is not the argument I’m making. What I am saying is that I hope you apply the same standards to all the companies you’re interacting with.
In all seriousness, I find this current dragonfly outcry ridiculous when you consider the NSA dragnet that’s currently monitoring most if not all US web traffic.
Censorship is just evil, full stop.
Brand is the most valuable asset Google has. Is the Chinese search market - and other evil projects - really worth the damage to Google's public image?
If there were clear intention from the majority of Western people to stop using every Google product the same second Google launch the censored search service in China, then Google would never do it.
Western people don't really care much? Well, they should blame themselves then, not Google.
This is a cop-out. Businesses have a responsibility for the decisions they make, and "it's profitable" should only be one factor.
> If there were clear intention from the majority of Western people to stop using every Google product the same second Google launch the censored search service in China, then Google would never do it.
I think you underestimate how much Google has become not just the default choice, but the only choice for a lot of people, who have never heard of alternatives and who use Google because it's what their browser defaults to (we even call the very act of running a search on the internet "Googling it"), and might not know how to switch, much less reasons why they should.
I find the "market forces will take care of it, and if they don't then people don't care" argument more than a little disingenuous, because it ignores the huge number of variables that account for why people choose product A over product Y that have nothing to do with the quality of the product or the company that makes it.
Not even close. See my other comment.
This is one reason why export controls on technology are important. The corporations don't mind helping oppressive governments lock up dissidents.
Who, next, wants all of Google's information about people in their country turned over to them?
As much as we in the US talk about out government compelling companies to turn over data, those companies _do_ have a say in what they will or can turn over and our government has some burden of proof that they need it. In China, based on my understanding, they have no choice, no say.
If the question was just "is this better for the Chinese?", I think I would agree with you. This _is_ better for the Chinese. The problem is that this raises the question of "where does this lead?" I don't think it leads anywhere good and, clearly, I'm not alone in that assessment.
Are you saying US companies should get one moral lapse for free?
> This _is_ better for the Chinese.
Neither you or the parent poster have indicated why it's better. You've described it as exactly the same as local search options. Is Google magical or what? Can the Chinese not make a search engine? Is it beyond them?
We'd like to think Google wouldn't do this just for the money, but Dragonfly sets precedent that it would do something just for the money.
There was no social unrest in China when Google pulled out and I’m pretty sure that in the scenario you’re describing, the Chinese wouldn’t give a fuck.
I mean they have had plenty of reasons for social unrest thus far, far better reasons actually and it did not happen.
> it's much more dangerous to allow Chinese tech companies to have a free monopoly without any resistance.
Seriously? Why?
> Seriously? Why?
Because this is actually happening. We're basically giving up billions of dollars to China for free.
I find this line of thinking to be very troubling, to be honest.
Another way to look at it is legitimization - Google doing the Chinese government's bidding through censorship could be construed as tacit approval. Indeed, the Chinese government may advertise it as such.
When has it ever put values above profits? Google is selling our data to everyone. What values?
I'm not sure Google has any values right now, unless somebody corrects me.
> And remember… don’t be evil, and if you see something that you think isn’t right – speak up!
https://abc.xyz/investor/other/google-code-of-conduct/
Media headlines from the time gave the impression that it was removed, which was absolutely false.
In April 2018, it was moved from the preface/beginning to the last end of code of conduct.
If it was really important to the company, there's no reason to push it towards the bottom, where most people would miss it.
What they are selling is the ability to run targeted ads based on that data. But the data never leaves Google!
DuckDuckGo [1], the non-tracking search engine, is seriously worth considering. It wasn’t good enough 5 years ago, but is now and serves well as my default search engine.
(I have no affiliation with DuckDuckGo, just rooting for them to stay true to their mission.)
Putting your name out there like this will just serve to have to replaced one at a time slowly which will kill the momentum until nobody is willing to take action again.
I printed this paper out to look at the names more and to keep for the record. If you signed it and are reading this comment, I find what you did incredibly brave (US hasn’t had almost any labor activism like this in decades), and worthy of much more merit than any CEO or billionaire co-founder. Thank you.
How do you know?
For work reasons I had to use chinese web, and believe me, the later is much worse for a westerner.
Minimal i18n, confusing visual design, payments that dont go throught, random network errors, total reliance on you having a mobile phone.
Yes, censhorship is bad, but I rather use censored service from a western company than a censored service from a chinese company.
It’s very plausible that Dragonfly will be used to feed people in China flat out misinformation and lies, and then monitor them 24/7.
News that doesn’t toe the party line will literally be deleted. Try and search for a controversial book or subject, and you’ll be placed on a watchlist. Fake news and government created media will be the first and only result always. In other words, the Chinese government will have more access than ever into the minds of its people, and then it will try to either manipulate them or just repress the problematic ones.
This will happen whether Baidu or Google does it, but that doesn’t make it morally acceptable for Google to join in. We don’t get a free pass to do evil just because we’re not the first.
In fact, it’s worse for Google than Baidu. The people at Baidu don’t have a choice, it’s the country they were born in. But Google is one of the world’s richest companies, and if they chose not to operate in China, it would just maintain the status quo, not actively hurt them.
There’s no moral justification for this, even if now the search engine is faster and more polished.
"Believe me" signals to me that I'm about to hear something shocking, yet it's followed by the anticlimactic "for a Westerner".
If you search the word "Baidu" in the first page of HN comments, you will find 0 results (at least at the time I'm writing this). No one cares the reality in China, because that's different than their imagination, and they live in their arrogant imaginations.
These people are just hypocrites. They don't care about human rights, or Chinese people's well-beings as they already lost human rights. They don't even bother to think in others' shoes. They are just feared. They are afraid that one day their own government will utilize the same practice and steal their little privacy. Cut the bullsh*t. If you really care about human rights, try to make some changes in China, start by making a better and healthier search engine than Baidu. There are many more evil business practices in China, like in food delivery, bike share, P2P loans, etc. Try make some healthier alternatives in these business as well. This is the way you should help human rights, not just keep ranting about something they have already lost.
Just do me a favor: ask any Chinese people you know, or think about this as you were Chinese: would you prefer a censored Google as an alternative, or the monopoly of Baidu? Please do this before you leave any comment.
However, let's guesstimate 55k full-time staff. That's .5%. At that level, it's a gesture that will get addressed in corporate-speak if at all. It's a vocal minority. You will not hear from the 20% that are in favor and the 79.5% that don't care much either way.
Now if they would all commit to (say) a 6-12 month timeline to "divest" or they will leave, that's saying something that Google will have to listen to. Sure, there is an unlimited supply of equally capable others that will be thrilled to take their place, but it will be a cultural game-changer, a risk the powers-that-be probably don't want to see play out.
First of all, I live outside of China and I am not against freedom of speech and human rights.
Let’s take a look at it at another angle: if Google drops dragonfly, the Chinese netizens will end up using “Baidu”, is it better or worse for the netizens of China? For the very least, dragonfly improves the situation from monopoly and gives much better/accurate/scam-free/spam-free search results. That is one way to improve their online experience.
I could be very wrong, but what I understand is these people oppose dragonfly because the government can restrict results, okay that’s not very ideal, but at least the government cannot force it to give false search results, right?
Positive: OTOH this activism has a potential to let companies know that some very smart people will not join you if your moral compass is faulty.
Now with increased efficiency with Dragonfly technology. Find enemies of the state with our world wide database, US and EU results included. All brought to you by the Alphabet platform.
Further research could be done on integrating this new dataset with Project Maven, think about the opportunities of engaging only with end users with score below a threshold.
Did I see something like this on Black Mirror?
The difference would be: you might not know you are lying while I do. We are doing the same thing, confirm something not conformable. Theoretically that's lying
Did you see my 2nd sentence which implied I was lying? Which almost means making a baseless claim?
You assumed that I assume he was lying only because he didn't cite source. That assumption is not correct.
Now I can tell you that I originally had 3rd sentence: the 2nd sentence is a lie. I do have solid evidence that he was lying (unintentionally I believe) but it's too difficult to present the evidence.
1989, downtown Cleveland, soon after Tiananmen Square. We'd all seen the "tank man" and people were talking about all the dead witnessed by those present (~10k?) versus the official cover story of 300 and denial.
So there were protests across the US, including downtown Cleveland, mostly visiting Chinese students from CSU and CWRU, and plenty of horrified locals there to support them. There were a couple of Chinese guys not marching but watching from the edges while people walked past. They both had the same sunglasses, trench coats, and SLR cameras with long lenses, and they were taking pictures of the marchers. If you've ever been in Cleveland in June, this is not appropriate attire for cloudy and windy, so they stood out from the locals. The Chinese on student visas told me they were government, often seen at such events, and they were cataloging Chinese there for later study and reprisals to family or when they returned home.
It's futile to explain yourself to someone if the person will just declare you "brainwashed" if you don't agree with them
I don't want to discount anyone's views, and it's not an all-or-nothing "they're brainwashed, ignore them", but to the extent the views were formed in a censored environment, I genuinely can't weigh them equally as evidence. Censorship is corrosive.
For an X about how an individual wants to live their own life, that is up to them: it's not for me to "accept" or "reject" it -- though I might think they're making a mistake. I wouldn't privilege moral/political claims to the same degree.
This might not be an exact relation, but my point is that it still may be worthwhile in a longer perspective. Social changes and engineering are nontrivial processes.
Boiling frog paradox and such...
"If you are a Uighur, you automatically lose 10 points," recalls Seytoff. "If you pray? Another 10 points. You've been overseas? Another 10 points. You have relatives overseas? Another 10 points. If you're 50 or below, you're unsafe and you go to a camp."
By simply having relatives overseas, you lose 10 points. Now imagine how many points you will lose if you have a relative signed this letter.
They may not want to sign the letter simply because they're offended by singling out China for opprobrium.
There are FAR more employees who either do not share these same views or are OK with the company pursuing its own profit-maximizing agenda independent of employees' personal political views. For example with workers not willing to build image recognition algorithms that assist/augment the capabilities of joystick-drone-operators, I bet there are a much larger number that are totally willing to work on it, and they are signaling that by not participating in employee activism even when it is socially/professionally safe to do so.
As for the others who are not just indifferent but are for the company's actions in pursuing new opportunities - they're just not screaming about it due to the intolerance exhibited by far-left progressives at these companies, especially with all the purposeful/malicious leaking,the Twitter outrage machine, and other vicious tactics used by the intolerant activists. And as a left progressive, I think that sort of behavior undermines all of us, and should not be tolerated.
These employees should be willing to accept a 50% reduction in compensation ( salary, bonus, stocks, etc). That would at least reduce costs for Google that's being actively blocked from revenue streams other American & European companies (Bing, Amazon, etc) are already participating in.
https://www.cnet.com/news/google-files-for-unusual-2-7-billi...
http://time.com/4060575/alphabet-google-dont-be-evil/
It's almost like the writing was on the wall but no one saw it...
For this reason is does not surprise me that this kind of thing was in the works and the ramifications to society being degraded in the name of big profits.
I wrote about some of these issues in comments here recently: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18546828
and if people started watching the pbs docu thing about the 2018 dilema of facebooks power and failures - and you started to watch part two at 43:11 till 45:30 ( https://www.pbs.org/video/the-facebook-dilemma-part-two-iev1... )- thinking it's about google - that sums way part of my feelings watching these things unfold over time on this side of the pond.
I am glad to see some people at google speaking outside the plex finally. These decisions have global consequences, and the culture of don't tell them so they can't use it against us, or steal our secret sauce, that omerta is part of the toxic culture that has created the faang monstrosities that are upon us today as they are.
To those that have chosen to speak out, thank you. I hope more open to the discussions occur.
Who's the new Google? Is there a company that can pick up the mantle of near-universal desirability to software engineers? I don't think it's any of the other FAANGs.
Leaving is step 2. If the employer continues to make choices that don't align with the employee's morals, the employee should leave.
For employees at a company like Google, both are important. Google is massive and impacts many people across the globe. And the employees are extremely employable - they could leave and go elsewhere with little personal sacrifice.
In this case investors are who can make any worthwhile difference and they should be appealing to investors. However, I imagine a significant chunk of investors don't even know/realize they are due to whole/broad market funds.
Google sees 17% of the world's population as potential customers via China so who is going to have their attention more 'thousands' of employees or 1.4 billion potential customers? The only way they're going to get Google's attention is to get shareholders concerned. There will always be employees willing to be on board with this, fact of the matter is most people just don't care as long as they are getting paid. They need to get investors against it if they want to have any hope of getting Google to not do this.
A Medium article, or a petition, or a 'hey thousands of us think you shouldn't do this', is unlikely to do a damn thing. If they want to make a stand they should have Amnesty International create a video campaign that describes, FROM PUBLIC SOURCES (to avoid any potential blowback from sharing company secrets/violating NDAs), what Dragonfly is and have non-Google employees that are industry experts comment on why they think it is a bad idea. Then the Google employees should share this on all of their social media, share it directly to their friends. You want to get outsiders championing the cause and generating attention and you want to minimize any single employees risk as much as possible by using non-employees to be the public face.
If I were doing it I'd do a video as Amnesty International, try and get the Internet Freedom Foundation on board, reach out to college human rights groups and try and grass roots the shit out of it to get as much media attention as possible which would increase chances of reaching the eyes of investors.
Doing it as a group of employees though, ehhhh, that's almost certainly going to do nothing and if anything it'll have a negative impact on employees and potentially result in future policies designed to thwart future attempts like this.
It sucks because it's too big of a market to effectively deter Google from wanting to bend to the will of the Chinese government.
Recognizing that there are paths available other than "doing what the company says" or "walking away" is a good thing, and people should speak up if they feel their work is being used in unethical ways.
There's a view that employees are subservient to employer's wills, to the extent they agree to stay under their employ. While obviously true to some extent, it seems silly to extend this to carte blanche for what employees must agree to be complicit in.
Rome didn't fall in a day, as they say.
I imagine most non-US readers, such as myself, won’t have any idea about that.
The mechanisms that change the system from inside that come from trade don't apply in this case. Either you are able to use different rules to change the system or not.
Maybe they just have worse PR?
Any value which actually drives organizational behavior in the real world is going to be complex -- complex enough that it cannot be fully conveyed in a 3-word-phrase. This is especially true when the phrase includes such a not-agreed-upon word as "evil". So the ways that the organization expects individuals to apply the phrase need to be explained. From to Lexington the data structure that humans have historically used to store those explanations-of-values is the story. So what stories did Google employees used to tell each other about "don't be evil" and what stories do they tell each other now?
Better search results? Better quality of information for Chinese researchers and developers? Better road information? Or email? Cloud services?
grumble, I think I'm getting jaded.
There's too much money to be made, and too many "journalists" willing to write puff pieces for Google and provide cover for this activity.
I appreciate you sending this letter, and your concerns have been duly noted. After careful deliberation however, we regret to inform you we have decided to proceed anyway.
Have a nice day.
both the US and China want Dragonfly for different reasons. each thinks it will benefit from Google's presence in China.
China is confident it will control the flow of sensitive information Dragonfly might obtain, and, at the same time, gain valuable insights about how Google operates, paving the way to ultimate replacement of Google in China (and perhaps outside China). plus, in the mean time, Dragonfly gives China some new leverage over Google's current global operations (e.g. calling Taiwan "China", promoting positive news about China to the outside world, etc).
the US government intelligence agencies are confident they will gain valuable information about China's society, government, military, and economy through Dragonfly (somehow). they want any inside presence they can get.
google is lukewarm on Dragonfly but thinks of it as a necessity. google knows it won't be profitable, but also knows that running Dragonfly gives it leverage to keep the US government's regulatory and anti-monopoly enforcement at bay, protecting its leadership in its most valuable market: the US.
Also, I am interested how the tense China-US relationship will effect the broader tech investment strategy in East Asia. Are we going to see divestment in the next 18 months by US tech companies in China?
Brad Fitzpatrick, Rob Pike, Ken Thompson, Jeff Dean, Sanjay, etc etc plus a lot of less famous people I know who work there. None of them have signed this open letter.
--
I recommend the author org add a call to action. There should be an easy way for other Google employees to add their name to the list!
However, between this and the 20,000 Google employee/contractor walkout I have gained a lot of respect for what the individual employees are collectively doing.
Hopefully this effort helps by encouraging search-oriented sneaker nets and decentralized content platforms. I think Google itself could provide the former, which would be very welcome in remote locations like Haiti.
Thanks to the absence of Google, monopoly of Baidu has enabled them to sell ads of unlicensed hospital that literally kills people.
A censored version of Google in Chinese will undoubtedly improve the quality of life of Chinese Internet users.
and where are the protesters when last year Google fired an engineer who wrote a memo questioning women in tech?
I bet those who signed think FaLunDaFa is a legitimate religion.
It was clearly demonstrated that all Google cares about is money, when they canceled project Maven immediately after protest, yet refuse to back down on Dragonfly. The only difference? Dragonfly promises to be immensely profitable, whereas Maven was small enough that the employees lost over it was assessed to cost more than the project’s profit.
So you really think that Google would then suddenly develop the moral fortitude, out of thin air, to reject bad ads in China that are nonetheless profitable? Even if their policy is to do so now, don’t expect that to stay — remember, their policy used to be ’we will not be complicit in censorship, because it is morally wrong, period.’
And even if it did, many would argue that it’s still a bad idea to seek a short term good at the expense of the long term. Enabling state censorship by giving the state more advanced censorship tech, could be seen as akin to enabling a heroin addict by giving them more heroin. Sure, they’ll feel good and they won’t suffer withdrawal. But overall it’s going to lead to a very dark place that ultimately yields extreme suffering and often even death.
Otherwise, another company will simply step into Googles place, or they could be tempted later to try again. The market is too profitable to do otherwise.
Isn't that the sort of thing that diplomacy, and national policy is for?
To me the optics of refusing to work for the US government on maven but complying with censorship in China seem very bad in the US’s politics climate. There is nonzero risk that the brand will be, for lack of a better word, fucked.
Pretty cool.
The assumption that profits rule the world is a projection. Imo, Innovation rules the world.
If this is the way we are heading, then I am kinda scared and feel like the only way for me to not be in the chopping block is to join them.
I help a lot of mom'n'pop type shops introduce innovations into their operations. Most places just need a solid online presence with a proper SEO strategy. Others need unique solutions that are foreign to their industries.
Values as people understand them are usually about neither profit nor "innovation". It's about people, morality, and goals other than money.
In strategy, there are 2 types of innovation
Incremental and Disruptive
Both types give organizations increased power over territory.
People are the blood of an organization. Ethics and people determine culture which determines goals.
Innovation is the strategic foothold for keeping an organization alive as it travels into the future.
EDIT: I want to add that all organizations (even non-business) need innovation. Civilizations, Empires, Protests, Support groups, Religious groups, etc... This is due to environments constantly changing. This is what Strategic Planners help with.
> Incremental and Disruptive
I'm guessing you're taking this from a particular philosophy, perhaps a particular known book. Even if the word makes sense in there, it's not necessarily how other people are using it.
For comparison, if you look at the first paragraph of Wikipedia's article on innovation, you'll find so much wiggle room in there that you could call every business "innovative".
EDIT: The phrase "Innovate or die" is popularized for the concept of profits or innovation.
All this bad-will seems to come from their advertising business models, which I find is loudly criticized with rather thin arguments, given that these companies are often the only ones defending the users from the dirty tactics of advertisers (who get none of the blame). I've neve seen criticism of coca-cola for using Google's targeting abilities to its advantage and shove ads down our throats for money without a moral concern. And rightly so.
You mean Google's effort to break into a market that it's currently frozen out of.
You made this bed. Now damn well lie in it, and think of England.
By writing a Medium post? What about offering resignations?
I might be downvoted to hell but man... writing a post is not taking a stand.
No. Them "engaging China" will not open up Chinese society, because Google will have to implement the exact same censorship regime that all the other Chinese sites do.
The Chinese government doesn't give a shit about Google's prestige in the West. They'll kick it out the second it gives them a little lip or is non-compliant with their demands. Google has zero power to change anything for the better.
Also, China has discredited the idea that capitalist engagement will cause liberalization. They've shown that an autocratic regime can have its capitalist cake and eat it too.
Google's leadership has a responsibility for doing what they think are best for the long term prospects of the company.
In the grand scheme of things, yet another censored search engine in China is not going to hurt anyone.
China can run their country however the hell they want. YOU may not agree with their values, but THEY might not agree with yours.
The irony is that Google is hardly known as a company that values free speech - look at what happened to James Damore.
As of a few moments ago the head count was 187 folks.
OH, you're getting a huge salary from Google, you say? Aaaaaaaah.
The danger isn’t simply that censorship exists, it’s that we won’t be able to tell what was censored.
I'd be curious to hear what people think a reasonable target is, 1%?
TL;DR: He said no.
(I find I had to update the old aphorism for the late 20th and 21st century. After centuries of studies on how to use words to manipulate people, words are now simply nearly useless and while I'm human and I can't claim total success, I try to just ignore them now. )
The fact that there's a large number of employees who signed this document provides great evidence to contradict this claim.
It's kind of a blanket statement - I'm sure a bunch of the folks here on HN work at Google and are trying to do exactly the opposite.
Heck, some of the people who signed off on this document could be HN'ers!
You can sometimes change a corrupt system from the inside. It takes a lot of work and dedication and it certainly doesn't always work out - but it's a choice some people make. It certainly isn't mine! :)
Unfortunately, that reversal and Facebook's more weakly enforced continuation of the same old type of policy both went mostly unnoticed. (Yes, I realize G+ is going away for consumer accounts in August. This change was years ago.)
As the saying goes, talk is cheap. So is signing a document.
What is not easy to do is putting your money where your mouth is and acting on your convictions, even if they cause you great discomfort.
It's not even a high-risk proposition, given how many other amazing opportunities are available to virtually every knowledge worker at Google.
In most companies employees have no freedom of speech unless unionized and not even then. And protesting against projects based on moral principles publicly is a sure way to get you fired.
Yes, but the job probably will pay less, at a smaller scale, with fewer perks, and be less interesting. Instead of judging them, perhaps you should support them in condemning their employer for this particular act.
Tough moral choices always come with a cost.
Taking a stand against collaboration with an oppressive totalitarian regime is much more effective than simply giving up and moving onward.
Things change when people act, not when people move on.
This absurd righteous indignation about China censorship is unbelievably hypocritical considering that nobody at Google tried to help Wikileaks shed light on US Government crimes.
While they were designed for combat, they are effectively the same thing that Brinks uses to transport money. They are meant to stop bad things from killing the people inside. They have 0 offensive weapons.
They are entirely defensive vehicles that have been used to rescue downed officers, civilians in harms way (gunfire), and multiple times in natural disasters where other vehicles would have gotten stuck.
While I get that they "look scary" to some people, they do have utility and come very cheap from the federal government that is trying to get them off their books. Local police pick them up because when there is a gunfight/hostage situation/disaster it's better to have one 5 mins away than an hour away.
I honestly don't get the outrage about them.
If Brinks trucks do the same work, use Brinks trucks. They are civilian vehicles and all of the tasks you list are civilian tasks.
Militarization of the police force is a very, very, very bad idea.
Anecdotal opinions. I know plenty of vets who don't think MRAPs are a big deal at all.
> If Brinks trucks do the same work, use Brinks trucks.
Armored cars cost hundreds of thousands of dollars to buy and outfit from companies like Lenco. MRAPs are bought for ~$1k (transport costs) from the federal government.
> Militarization of the police force is a very, very, very bad idea.
If the vehicles do the same tasks, in mostly the same way, what's the difference?
On the civilian side, you get to feel like you live in a goddamned war zone, with the police as combatants. It's not a nice feeling.
My own approach is to treat cops as large, gun-wielding wild animals: maybe they'll be fine, but in any interaction there's a chance they'll fuck up your life permanently. And that's a direct consequence of having police on 'war footing' with the community, where the default reactions to problems are either violence or long-term imprisonment. And the ethics of this extends beyond my own interactions: if I see something illegal happening, calling the cops means putting people in extreme danger. As a result, I'm not going to call the cops for anything less than assault. Thus, police militarization works against actual enforcement of the law, because it estranges police from the population. (For a whole lot more, go listen to season 3 of the Serial podcast...)
I'm not sure diplomacy works when someone is actively shooting at you or other people.
If people are rioting (actually rioting, not protesting) then I honestly don't care how the presence of a MRAP makes them feel. It's the police's job to stop the riot and they need tools to do that.
> I'm not going to call the cops for anything less than assault.
I'm glad you're not the majority. Because the world would be pretty shitty if all the police responded to was physical assaults and above.
Most of the time, police aren't being shot at. And they tend to react to peaceful protest exactly as if it were a riot. This is well documented.
Here's an example I was present for: Peaceful protest at the university. Cops in riot gear show up, fly around in helicopters, etc. One of the cops pushes/bumps a girl who then bounces into another cop, who slams her against the hood of cop car, arrests her, charges her with assault, and tries to get her expelled from the university. (The same department, six months later, gave us this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6AdDLhPwpp4 )
> I'm glad you're not the majority. Because the world would be pretty shitty if all the police responded to was physical assaults and above.
If that's not the world you like, let's fix the police!
Key phrase there. We expect our police to be equipped for any situation. So what happens when something like the North Hollywood shooting happens again and you have pinned cops/civilians? In that case officers had to commandeer actual money trucks and raid gun shops to get the equipment they needed to stop the shooters.
> Here's an example I was present for
If that's true then I'm all for punishments / legal action against officers that do wrong.
> If that's not the world you like, let's fix the police!
I'm all for police reform where evidence shows it can help.
In practice, most of the time, all that gear is used to serve no-knock warrants on non-violent offenders (usually involving drugs).
Maryland used to publish statistics for their use of SWAT teams; look that up, and note the breakdown on kinds of circumstances they were called in for, and whether it was no-knock or not. No-knock generally means busting doors and sometimes ramming walls (with those very MRAPs), throwing flashbangs etc.
I mean, not only is it required by law, as per Graham v. Connor, but the current trend in national standards for dealing with riots is trending towards implementing de-escalation techniques and other measures designed to protect the sanctity of life rather than using escalating violence to disperse the crowd.
For riots, obviously using other dispersion tactics is preferable and should be used before physical force is employed.
So the best option is to go to the other extreme, and give our police military weapons, vehicles, and armor--except that police get a looser RoE, they investigate themselves, and have a great history of murdering civilians.
> If people are rioting (actually rioting, not protesting) then I honestly don't care how the presence of a MRAP makes them feel. It's the police's job to stop the riot and they need tools to do that.
These vehicles show up at protests. Someone else here suggested we look them up on YouTube so we can see how they SAVE LIVES when police use them. Except the only video that I found in my admittedly short YouTube search was the police using these at a protest, lol. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=71-R2D0-wOI&t=3462s I'm so glad the police had all of that protection there. Phew. Saved so many police lives.
> I'm glad you're not the majority. Because the world would be pretty shitty if all the police responded to was physical assaults and above.
Only ancentotal, I know, but every time I have called the cops for any reason in my life, the situation was arguably made worse for everyone present... In some cases, severely so.
In m several cases, the threat of deadly force was brought into cases where nothing but a stern hand was needed. In one, it almost resulted in the death of the person that was actually doing the most to help the situation.
I will never again call the police for any reason unless I think with some certainty that a life will be lost if I dont.
The difference is that the 1033 program comes with a use-it-or-lose-it utilization requirement, which means that the cheap transfer of military equipment has a built in incentive to overuse it. They are often suitable for tasks that police rarely face, which at a steep discount makes them seem like good deals anyway. But then they must be used soon to be kept. So they get used in less appropriate circumstances as a direct consequence of the terms of transfer.
It's my understanding that the requirement is a stop-gap for a single dept ordering 500 of these vehicles and parking them in a warehouse or selling them off. Basically if they use it for training and have it at the ready for call-outs then they satisfy the requirement.
It’s really a question of training rather than equipment or appearance.
Last time I was in Time Square some of them were lining up for photos with the general public. The crowd seemed pretty at ease knowing that if shit went down those guys were there to stop it.
So for the purposes of the topic at hand, giving the US police military equipment is probably a bad idea. At least until there’s been an institutional culture shift, which will take decades at least.
Cannot imagine why people might be concerned about its use in law enforcement.
Also not uncommon in warzones.
Uncommon, however, almost everywhere else in the world.
"The November 2015 Paris attacks were a series of coordinated terrorist attacks that took place on Friday, 13 November 2015 in Paris, France and the city's northern suburb, Saint-Denis. Beginning at 21:16 CET, three suicide bombers struck outside the Stade de France in Saint-Denis, during a football match. This was followed by several mass shootings and a suicide bombing, at cafés and restaurants. Gunmen carried out another mass shooting and took hostages at an Eagles of Death Metal concert in the Bataclan theatre, leading to a stand-off with police. The attackers were shot or blew themselves up when police raided the theatre."
As you can see, the streets of Paris did indeed become a battlefield, filled with hostile attackers, leading to many casualties. It's easy to see why even Paris was not immune to terrorism/armed assailants and needed to have armored vehicles.
Oh, and they do that to serve no-knock warrants on weed possession, no violent crimes involved.
The problem isn't where police are good; the point is to design a system that inherently protects against abuse by the very small percentage of LEOs that do become corrupt and abuse their special powers that civilians do not have. How do we protect against this?
Perhaps the simplest and most robust way to protect against this abuse is simply to limit the magnitude of power imbalance between the government and the people! One could argue that this principle applies to physically defensive equipment as much as it does to computer and information systems, and any other mode of power. Additionally, this notion is encoded into our country's constitution at least in some ways.
Therefore, this leads to the question: Can a civilian buy an MRAP? If so, I think your argument works very well -- especially since they're defensive machines. If a civilian cannot buy one though, I could see the argument against police using them gaining favor.
Yes you can if you found one for sale (not sure what that market looks like). Civilians can also buy decommissioned tanks, Two ton trucks, humvees, etc.
There is also the fact that even if a civilian could technically buy one, it's not really feasible to actually do so.
> There is also the fact that even if a civilian could technically buy one, it's not really feasible to actually do so.
Keep in mind that these vehicles were originally bought by the Pentagon using civilians' money (tax money). So far for feasibility.
* you can however buy a modern rifle that's made to have its automatic mode disabled, but my understanding is that it's trivial to modify to become automatic (but it will no longer be legal)
Also the ones that are on the market (pre-86) go for tens of thousands of dollars to start. They are basically coveted by rich collectors who show them off at designated "machine gun shoot" days at specialty ranges.
> but my understanding is that it's trivial to modify to become automatic
It's not trivial. Requires decent gun-smithing skill, the ability to craft an auto sear, and some extra parts. To my knowledge no one has been confirmed to have done that and convicted of it in recent history.
https://www.newfrontierarmory.com/shop/m-16-full-auto-lpk/
The reason why it's legal is because these will only fit in a full auto receiver, which is the regulated part. But most semi-auto lower receivers can be converted to accept said full auto trigger group simply by drilling a single hole in the receiver. Which is also fairly trivial, given that you're drilling aluminum, and jigs are readily available:
https://www.newfrontierarmory.com/shop/m-16-drilling-jig/
If you ever hear references to the "third hole" in gun context, or see the meme linked below, that's what it is about.
I had an old 12-gauge semi that you could break a match stick off in the breach, and it would unload the entire magazine automatically with one pull of the trigger. That was pretty trivial.
My point, is these were given to the police. While a civilian may technically be eligible to buy one for $500k (bulk pricing) but we realistically have no opportunity to purchase. So the parent's comment applies.
Basically an MRAP is just a big truck so as long as it didn't break any traffic laws (too wide, too heavy, etc) then I'd assume its fine. Would depend per state though.
Look up "The Big Sandy Shoot" on YouTube. All vehicles and artillery pieces you see there are privately owned.
MRAPs have high maintenance and running costs. The simple fact that they are former military vehicles contributes to the military mindset of many police depts, something that should be avoided. Militarization of police forces is bad for citizens.
Serious eye roll here. You're discarding all of the other capabilities and suggesting that because it is ALSO mine resistant it must be bad.
> MRAPs have high maintenance and running costs.
That's assuming they are used all the time. Most departments have them parked at their HQs and only use them for call outs or training. Regular maintenance wouldn't reach the same levels of cost as buying a bearcat + maintaining that. Also as more depts get them, the maintenance costs will go down (excluding the OP comment here's area).
> contributes to the military mindset of many police depts
While I generally agree with that notion, I would much rather them buy the cheaper milsurp vehicle with more capability than buy one from Lenco, or not buy one at all and have to wait an hour during an active shooter.
Having driven and gunned on an MRAP... yes, the mine resistance makes it bad. You resist mines by 1. moving away from them and 2. presenting armor at an angle. On a truck like an MRAPs, you mount it very high above the ground and for the size and weight, the interior space is limited because the chassis is sloped upwards.
That's more than enough reason not to deploy them.
It changes "we're here to serve and protect" to "we will crush you if you step out of line".
No it's not. These vehicles can, and have saved lives. I have yet to hear of an MRAP killing someone in the US.
> "we will crush you if you step out of line"
Better wording would be "if you throw rocks or shoot at us we are still going to arrest you".
Citation needed. Police all over the world do their jobs without these tanks. Is there any data proving crime goes down in cities where they are deployed? Is there any data proving that less lives are lost when these tanks are deployed in US cities?
> Better wording would be "if you throw rocks or shoot at us we are still going to arrest you".
People have been throwing rocks at and shooting at US police for two centuries. How does having a tank help in arrests? Officers can't arrest from inside the tank. They have to get out of it and approach on foot. How is this different from stepping out from behind a building or any other vehicle and approaching on foot?
They could drive to the scene in a yellow school bus and the result would be the same. They have to exit the bus and approach on foot.
Several active shooter situations where they need to retrieve downed officers / civilians without exposing the rescue team to gunfire. Most recently in the Pittsburgh shooting it was reported they used an armored vehicle to get to injured officers outside.
> Police all over the world do their jobs without these tanks.
First of all they are not tanks. They have no offensive capabilities so they would be classified as armored personnel carriers.
Second, these exist all over the world, here are some image results: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=european+riot+vehicle&t=ffab&iar=i...
> People have been throwing rocks at and shooting at US police for two centuries. How does having a tank help in arrests?
Allows officers to take cover behind it while the vehicle moves forward. When it reaches the people throwing rocks they can move to effect the arrest.
For shootings it allows them to much closer to barricaded subjects and make sure they cant escape / provides a platform to negotiate peaceful surrender.
Here is an EU police car. Note it's bright colours to be easily spotted. Dare I say this car looks friendly. http://cdn1.blog.powerblocktv.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/10...
Now, here's a US police _interceptor_. The front grill looks like it's ready to ram me. http://s3.caradvice.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/2011-F...
The MRAP's to your point only exacerbate existing problems in the US police state. I don't see why the police (and some folks here) can't see that.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PIT_maneuver [1] https://youtu.be/OjvBYk8_8HI?t=19
Maybe it could get a cute paint job like the Focus and split the difference?
if the police have armored vehicles, that means that they perceive a need for armored vehicles. When officers walk past them, they are reminded that they are needed. When officers are inside them, they feel simultaneously invulnerable and threatened -- all this armor means that someone must want to kill them.
From the other side, a community that sees MRAPs going past has to believe that there's a need for armored protection for the police -- so there must be a corresponding threat from armed criminals. The affluent parts of the community perceive more of a threat, and the disadvantaged part of the community has solid evidence that the police are an occupying military force, not protection.
In other words, the presence of the MRAPs creates a problem for everyone. It escalates tension.
Great, but there are use cases for armored vehicles. Whether its an MRAP or a Bearcat.
There are always going to be barricaded persons, hostage situations, active shooters, riots, and natural disasters that need responding to and those seem to be the best tools for the job. The goal is to get as close to the subject as possible without anyone getting hurt. From there you can control the scene and use it as a position to de-escalate.
If these tools are being used inappropriately, I am all for legislation to curb that.
Perception resulting from conscious, deliberate actions; or, viewed another way, nonverbal communication. Yes, it's key to police work.
"Barricaded person": doesn't need an MRAP, they need a therapist.
"Hostage situation": generally also doesn't need an MRAP, they need a specialized therapist.
"Active shooter": here's note from a company that really wants to sell you training on how to deal with an active shooter -- http://www.activeresponsetraining.net/10-lessons-learned-fro... -- note that even with their spin, they can't come up with any evidence that an MRAP would be helpful.
"Riots" -- There's a list on Wikipedia. What percentage were caused by the police murdering people? 12 of 29 in the last ten years.
"Natural disasters": don't require tanks. Heavy trucks? Rugged 4WD? More investment in firefighting equipment? Sure. Hauling around tons of armor on a vehicle with a high center of gravity? Silly.
And cars have airbags and seatbelts because other drivers actively want to crash onto your car?
If you think Google not wanting to work with the U.S. military is some "conservative" axe, I think you likely live in a bubble.
How do you feel about Google respecting the EU's right to be forgotten? Over 40,000 requests from politicians have been received to remove themselves from search results. Do you agree with Google abiding by this form of censorship?
Which is better - access to the information that's made available, or access to no information at all?
Think of the user. Does a user benefit from being able to clear a permanent record, long after punishment has been served?
Does a user benefit if Google facilitates government spying?
You can be for the right to be forgotten (and admit to its abuses by politicians and rich hucksters), and against government censorship.
This distinction is powerful and therefor often abused: "It is for the good of the people that people can not dissent and revolt". But hard to argue that's the case for EU user protection laws.
Yes. Chinese users will most definitely greatly benefit from having a censored Google in China instead of having just a censored Baido.
The only people who won't benefit from it are self entitled 20-year-old Google employees across the ocean who in reality don't give a shit about Chinese people, what they want, or how the average Chinese person feels like, but care a lot about appearing righteous in front of their peers.
I find the idea of rich western individuals debating in their exclusive social club the theoretical moral faults of allowing to give the Chinese access to modern technology extremely condescending, and completely disconnected for any actual concern or understanding of real people. It's obvious that all of those people would feel better with themselves if people in China rotted for eternity with their existing tools, as long as they don't have to hear anything about it.
I do find the lack of objections there to be rather hypocritical at best. Doing the right thing isn't always easy. Especially if the wrong thing was helping your POV. The ends to emphatically not justify the means.
Google is free to create a censored and wiretapped search engine app for China. But it should give transparency to everyone contributing to Google (especially those indirectly contributing insights or technology), so they can make an informed decision to work there.
> allowing to give the Chinese access to modern technology
This is not a problem or an issue. Nobody would have a problem with a Chinese Google Search engine. It is about facilitating spying, potentially contributing damage to free speech and human rights, about organizing the world's information vs. a government controlled propaganda machine.
What then is the issue, is that Google is very powerful at search and modern technology. And these systems are thus extra damaging in potential. Slapping Google brand on it carries responsabilities.
I do agree this issue has reached the stage of moral outrage. I think this is largely due to the leaks and surprise revelations. Senior Google AI now silent on this issue, yet vocal against Facebook or changing name of conferences.
I would hope the outrage would be the same or louder when this happened in the US, not China, so I don't think it is very much a thing of priviledged West vs. poor East.
What you have here are American engineers choosing to not work in support of greater state surveillance for another country. Reducing it to thinking that all they're doing is wanting to virtue-signal is condescending.
Can you not see that the crux of your post, calling out others' supposed condescension, appears to be projecting a bit?
This is irrelevant because Dragonfly is about bringing search to China, not handing over access to user data to the government.
The Chinese firewall blocks 18k websites. The Right to be Forgotten is censoring way more information than China's firewall because it is allowing government officials to specifically target and censor all information about themselves, not just generic websites.
Only on HN...
On HN, the idea is: if you have a substantive point to make, make it thoughtfully; if you don't, please don't comment until you do. If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and use the site as intended in the future, we'd appreciate it.
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18545761.
Are the employees that make $200,000/year donating the extra income to those in need or are they buying things to engage in lifestyle inflation like most people? Are they going to quit Google and work for a non-profit?
To “Experimenting with Evil”, so we’re not full blown Orwell yet.
I'm also a Chinese person. China matters is like an extra AOS for me and so I apply cosmetic filters for the same reasons
It's still the best, but the profit motive is harming the amazing work that Google once did.
First, anything piracy related. Previously you could search something like "albumname zip rar torrent" and get vast lists of downloads. It's unclear whether the presence of scam links or the illegality of filesharing prompted the removal of valid results for this class of searches, but it's nonetheless true that this type of search returned useful results in the past and is now fully, intentionally, and obviously nerfed.
Second, the filtering GUI for searches has degraded over time. Timeboxing and verbatim searches will negate one another when trying to build some queries. I brought this to the team's attention [1] and received a response last June, and it's still broken as of last week. Attempting to bypass the GUI by combining the desired URL params from two searches also yielded broken results, IIRC.
Google's search is in many ways improved since 2008, but it's also worse in some ways. Subjectively, it feels that in the last decade, search has transitioned from "show me what is on the internet, limited by the power of our algorithms" into something more like "show me what is on the internet, limited by the overton window[2] of our legal, PR, and advertiser-relations departments".
I liken google's transition, in search and elsewhere, to apple's. As they've grown, their customer base has changed from "small number of hackers" to "large number of laymen" and the preferences and tolerances of those groups shifts in a way that causes these products to be less useful for the HN crowd. One of the core shifts is away from "build abstractions to wrangle reality in custom ways" to "build abstractions that obscure reality in convenient ways".
I don't have the answers here. It seems that if you want your reality to be unbounded by such filters, you're doomed to be some kind of hacker/pirate/outlaw/non-normie.
[1] https://twitter.com/riiiiiiiikk/status/1012859335095959552
I'd say it has gone full; "Show me what your advertisers and other sources of income, would like someone like me to find on the internet."
But my gut says that it's not that google is defending the sanctity of such results, but that those results are an annoyance and not a real threat, so are just off the radar. When someone with enough sway wants them gone, I've got no doubt they'd be nerfed too.
Your complaint about their service is that they've made it more difficult for you to break the law?
> Certain words & phrases I know would produce legitimate useful search results in 2008 will now just pull pages of unrelated ads.
A person asked for examples. I delivered examples. I'm not contesting that the search is illegal in some jurisdictions. Merely pointing out that there are searches for which google used to return results with utility, and now intentionally do not return such results, and fall back to irrelevant suggestions.
Although the comment I made said more than what you implied it to, I will explicitly make the complaint you're mocking: Yes, I am unhappy that such results are censored. But it's not merely "I want free albums". I want to be able to search the internet. Not someone else's ideas of what the internet ought to be. It's a legally and ethically difficult problem, to be sure, but I think mocking the idea of supporting searches that the government dislikes is a step too far.
The Chinese and US governments' censorship regimes are not equivalent in magnitude, so it's not fair to compare them simply, but just as we can entertain the idea that the chinese are unfree in their searches for information, and as a result the breadth of what they can think about and experience, let's recognize that so too are we in the western world.
I don't mind that they're blocking rom sites. I do mind that they don't have the courage to just say "We're not going to return anything for those terms".
That was also true when search results were purely based on terms entered, barring the domain name affecting the default language, and user configuration.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filter_bubble
> A filter bubble – a term coined by Internet activist Eli Pariser – is a state of intellectual isolation that allegedly can result from personalized searches when a website algorithm selectively guesses what information a user would like to see based on information about the user, such as location, past click-behavior and search history. As a result, users become separated from information that disagrees with their viewpoints, effectively isolating them in their own cultural or ideological bubbles.
I remember when was totally normal to settle how a word was spelled by looking what spelling had how many results. I'm not saying that wasn't silly, but I actually remember people actively using that "consensus reality" in forums, all the time. "how did you find that", "I entered X and then it was the third result", "oh yeah I see, thanks". The traditional exception was things blocked on youtube in various countries, but otherwise we took it for granted that if you visit a certain public URL, you get the page someone else would get.
That doesn't mean one confuses those Google search results with reality anymore than every person in the cinema seeing the same movie means they confuse it with reality. It just means that experience is part of the common world they inhabit. When I go into a library, the selection of books there is rather arbitrary, but that's still very different from there just being a clerk who might recommend one book to me, to then lie to someone else and pretend to not know that book.
One difference between Google and an old-fashioned library: however arbitrary the collection was, you'd always find the canon, the best selected by the people who could reasonably be expected to know the best. Today, especially on YouTube, there is no canon, no conception of best at all. It's just whatever Google selects according to the signals it deems likely to keep you watching.
https://www.google.com/search?q=nuclear 397.000.000 results
https://www.google.com/search?q=nucular 172.000 results
Which obviously still works, but it was just the most simple example of "search engine consensus reality" I could think of.
Perhaps not coincidentally that's about when the fundamentally-a-bad-idea service of Facebook started to get huge as it grew past college campuses, and showed it was really easy—like, incredibly easy—to convince all these new Internet users to give strangers tons of information about themselves, in gross violation of previous Internet norms of avoiding posting personal info anywhere, and that one could make stupid amounts of money by facilitating these poor choices.
Are these people going to actually do anything - quit in protest, sabotage, what? No, they are going to whine, and keep drawing their very lucrative salaries and benefits. Put up or shut up.
Your cynicism is not insightful or interesting.
Americans self-censor tits and genitals, Europeans self-censor violence. Censorship is everywhere.
I think this whole discussion is extremely naive.
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Master-Switch-Rise-Information-Empire...
1. Comes across as ad-hominem
2. Comes across as emotional/pedantic
3. For example, yes "pornography" is censored on broadcast TV, but many other things aren't. There are obviously degrees of censorship.
4. If your goal is to convince people that things are more censored than they realize you might want to cite some real world examples of political censorship that happened in America that support that point.
5. Your whole comment is pretty much irrelevant to the discussion at hand. Regardless of whether censorship is common or uncommon in the US, it's still meaningful to take a stance against creating a politically-censored search in China.
Here's my motivation - I think there are actually some pretty scary problems out there. However, I think it is possible to talk about an important issue in a way so emotional that it actually backfires and creates a negative impression of those who care about an issue.
For example, Alex Jones is right to lament the pesticide atrazine that changes frogs sexes [1], but by virtue of being Alex Jones actually may look a wider swath of environmentally-conscious look somewhat unreliable by association.
Another example is Al Gore: even though he had an important message on climate change his manner was so distasteful that it's hard to argue he helped the cause.
When I see someone who agrees with my beliefs but comes across as hysterical I try to metaphorically "hold a mirror up" so they can learn to phrase their message in a way that won't drive people away.
As in, every single comment in it states that censorship wouldn't exist if Google didn't cooperate with China on this? Or that there is just "censorhip" or "no censorship", without any further qualification or context?
That's clearly not the case, so what is this even in response to?