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Comment by bww | Hacker News Reader

You may recall that Google dramatically pulled out of the mainland Chinese market about 10 years ago on the basis of exactly these principles (at least ostensibly).

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.

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Google merely closed their office in China and (passively) stopped offering their search and mail services. The money making part of Google (AdSense, Android) has been making a killing in China over the past decade. Despite the posturing on both sides, the relationship between Google and the Chinese regime is much cosier than people often assume.

I don't think Chinese Regime and Google are any close to each other, your other remarks are also inaccurate.

Which part of my post was inaccurate?

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.

Source? It seems accurate, but someone is silently downvoating without clarifying, I feel in bad faith.

I think Netflix purposefully chose to not enter the Chinese market. I wonder how these companies that enter China would feel once they send communist party members to sit at management meetings. That’s known to happen during Mao era and I am certain some form of this will surface as the economy slows down.

I don't think this would come as a surprise to any executive planning to grow their business in China. Large companies are already obliged to create an internal party unit[0]. It's factored in as part of the cost of doing business here.

[0] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-congress-companies-...

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