Somehow I think the Chinese people are better off with access to Google than without. It’s not like Google is actively developing next gen censorship and oppression technology by applying a url blacklist.
I think the Chinese people are better off without the Chinese government having access to Google. Google is at it's core an advertising and surveillance company. Its true customers are not the users but the advertisers. Political advertising (AKA propaganda) would only get more powerful in China with Google as an outlet.
It also does justify and support censorship Chinese people are subjected to. You can argue that is not up to Google to judge the chinese government and that might be correct. It still cooperates with the regime, so the accusation of supporting censorship is valid.
Google is following the local laws, like they try to do everywhere. That doesn't make the Chinese government any more of a "regime" than the US government.
Which doesn't even need to make many laws like that because companies like Google and FB will happily comply [0], with what they expect might ruffle some feathers [0] before having the regulation forced on them.
[0] https://www.theverge.com/2016/3/9/11184660/facebook-ban-arti...
I don't think I like this quality in a search service.
It's a quality you can dislike, but you'll be hard-pressed to find a search engine with anywhere near the same order of magnitude of quality that doesn't adhere to these rules also. DDG does. Yahoo does.
For a corporation, to refrain from working with the government is to be hounded by the government. That's semi-incompatible with providing services.
And would Google provide child pornography if mandated to do so?
I don't expect very much from a corporation trying to get into new markets. But I will still point my finger at them.
Someone's going to say that letting companies make moral judgments is a slippery slope. But someone's gotta do it. I don't claim access to universal truth, but some things are clearly wrong.
I don't claim universal moral authority. Lots of things are complicated. Some things aren't. Morality can be relative, and there's some interesting philosophical discussion to be had there, but eventually you have to take a stand on something.
Just saying its wrong/right its useless without any concrete action behind it.
> Just saying its wrong/right its useless without any concrete action behind it.
Of course. That's why I think concrete action should be taken. In this case, Google should not support totalitarian government censorship. I'm honestly not sure what your point was here.
It's at least evidence in that direction. Where's the evidence that it is not?
Discussing the definition of evil can certainly be an enlightening exercise, and people have been writing about it for thousands of years. But if, say, you see a guy roofie a stranger's drink, you don't sit back and ponder whether the rape he's planning has meaning in the grand sense. You do something about it. Or at least I hope you do.
I do actually believe morality is essentially a preference, like taste for chocolate. I have read some works arguing the opposite; I did not find them convincing, as very few presented any kind of evidence (scientific or otherwise).
Moral relativism is the agnostic position, anything else must be supported by evidence, or it's just faith.
> if, say, you see a guy roofie a stranger's drink, you don't sit back and ponder whether the rape he's planning has meaning in the grand sense. You do something about it. Or at least I hope you do.
This question arises from the confusion that moral universalists get into due to their own position. They assume the universally shared moral value that if two things have equal worth (in this case, my morality and the roofier's), one must treat them the same. But one shouldn't assume such shared values, let alone with moral relativists.
I can recognize that my morality is no "better" than the roofier's, and still stop him, just because I want to. A football player doesn't have to assume they are more worthy of winning to try to score more than their opponents.
If only that was true. They routinely fight against government rulings in democratic countries because they can. For example, fines from European Union. They don't simply rollover and pay the fines rather exhaust all measures to try and avoid it.
All the while they will rollover in China because that might hurt their chances of getting into a rather lucrative market.
They are both "regimes", if you're American. Are you British perhaps?
From Wikipedia: "Webster's definition states that the word régime refers simply to a form of government, while Oxford English Dictionary defines regime as "a government, especially an authoritarian one"."
> While the word régime originates as a synonym for any type of government, modern usage has given it a negative connotation, implying an authoritarian government or dictatorship.
And that's by far the most common context for using the term. Barely anybody uses "regime" as a neutral term, it's usually used to denounce a government/administration as "bad/illegitimate/not democratic". For the same reason "regime change" is called like that to give it a semblance of being a legitimate course of action to "build democracy", while a forced "government change" suddenly doesn't sound all that nice anymore.
Case in point: https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2017/05/04/... (open incognito to bypass paywall)
You're right, they are actively developing next-gen censorship and oppression technology with much more advanced and stealthy methods.
* AMP is still a thing, right