Companies are going to have to decide how important the Chinese market is or risk eroding the trust and good will for all of their other customers. You can’t stand on the boat of democracy and the boat of a dictatorship t the same time.
That didn’t exactly last. And China is a much more important market now than it was then. I wouldn’t hold out too much hope for a bunch of gazillion dollar companies to decide to favor principles over revenue anytime soon.
Google still has access to the google.cn domain as well as several valid ICP licenses; a number of services (fonts, firebase and chrome/SDK downloads to name a few) are accessible from China hosted on a Google affiliated server in Beijing. AdWords have been thriving in China for a number of years and even the localised version of Google maps (ditu.google.cn) is still being maintained despite a nonexistent user base.
None of this would have been possible if the government is actually hostile to Google in the way you believe.
[0] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-congress-companies-...
These companies are, at the minimum, complicit in literal child slavery in the production of their chocolate. [1] This gets a piece run in the mainstream news once every couple of years or so. People express shock and awe, vow to boycott the companies, come up with some neat slogans or hashtags and all that. A few days after the next outrageous news piece comes up, it's a distant memory. And that's over something that's like comic book villain black and white bad, or in other words that there is going to be nothing but quite strong derision for that situation.
Hershey and Nestle are showing record breaking stock prices. Mars is private, but it's safe to assume the same.
The same is true of most topics now a days. The vast majority of activism is not driven by individual initiative, but by media attention. That means when the media spotlight fades, so does interest in the topic. In this particular case, the revelation of PRISM [2] (of which Apple, Google, and all major US tech providers are a part of) reshaped my entire perspective of the world and of these companies. Ask yourself why these companies would participate in such a program. For many, it's now just a distant memory - and you even have people now arguing that PRISM couldn't have been that bad. After all, the media isn't even talking about it anymore.
[1] - https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2019/business/hershe...
[2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM_%28surveillance_program%...
Sure you can, any company that doesn't have dictatorial control of what software runs on devices they manufacture would not be in this situation in the first place.
>Companies are going to have to decide how important the Chinese market is or risk eroding the trust and good will for all of their other customers. You can’t stand on the boat of democracy and the boat of a dictatorship at the same time.
Emphasis on customers. Clearly, the customers have spoken on this, as well as any other atrocity that has happened in the past.