[dnomad]

> At the risk of sounding nationalistic, I think companies in the United States and other democratic countries should reconsider any and all business relationships with authoritarian regimes like those in China and Russia.

It just sounds stupid. Looking at the situation rationally it is the US that has in just the last 20 years (a) attacked several countries and murdered hundreds of thousands of innocent people and (b) revealed it is running the most extensive surveillance network in the history of the planet that legally and illegally attempts to surveil everybody including even allied political leaders and (c) regularly threatens to nuke and completely destroy other countries.

And somehow, despite all of this, we are supposed to think China is the authoritarian regime?

I know it's hard to imagine because Americans are completely lost in their bubble but the rest of the world understands well that it is the US, not Russia and certainly not China, that is the greatest threat to the world's peace and prosperity [1]. There's a difference between a country that is focused on exports and a country that bombs weddings and targets its own citizens for assassination on foreign soil.

Google returning to China is a good thing if only because it means the power of the US' murderous regime has over the multinational.

Realistically, it is not clear that China's censorship demands are unique outside of Asia or even Europe. China will ask Google to do the same monitoring and blacklisting that the corporation already does for Thailand, Malaysia and even Germany. None of this is new or even particularly unreasonable to the millions and billions of other people on the planet who don't live in the US. Believe it or not these people actually have their own ideas about how they want the internet to work.

[1] https://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2017/08/07/polls-us-g...

[cageface]

You’re right that the USA has committed many sins of its own but freedom of expression in the USA is still protected to a degree unthinkable in places like China or Russia or Vietnam.

I can go on Facebook right now and post any opinion I like of my government. See how long you have to wait for a knock on your door if you try this in one of those other countries. The censorship demands made by China, for example, absolutely are of a different character and breadth than any made in the west.

[dnomad]

> I can go on Facebook right now and post any opinion I like of my government.

No you can't. Facebook regularly censors content just like every other rational organization on the planet that hosts a forum. (Though it's a bit amusing to hear how free Americans think themselves to be when so many of them struggle to get basic healthcare.)

> The censorship demands made by China, for example, absolutely are of a different character and breadth than any made in the west.

You might consider that different cultures actually have different standards about what's acceptable speech. There are certainly other Asian countries which control speech much more rigorously than China ever could. Indeed, it seems China doesn't care so much about criticism until it becomes actionable (ie protests, terrorism). Anybody familiar with China would understand there's actually plenty of criticism of the government in a nation of a billion people. Compare this with regimes where insulting the royal family can land one in jail. Yet Google happily operates in these countries.

And of course, not ironic at all, here come the proud HN free-speech defenders eager to downvote the pesky facts they don't like.

[cageface]

I didn't downvote you but what you're saying is just trivially, factually untrue and you're conflating several different things. Healthcare in the US is a mess and the evils of US foreign policy are well documented but to claim that there is no significant difference between the degree of control that China and the US exert over the internet is just silly and not at all dependent on any pesky "facts".

[amaccuish]

> the USA has committed many sins of its own but freedom of expression in the USA is still protected

So Americans being able to say what they like is more important than the chaos the American government has wrought on the rest of the world? I'm not sure what you're saying.

[cageface]

I’m saying those are two different things. Parent post was conflating them, along with healthcare, for some reason.

[sheepmullet]

> the US that has in just the last 20 years (a) attacked several countries and murdered hundreds of thousands of innocent people

Where do you get your anti-US propaganda from?

I think the combined civilian death toll by US forces in Afghanistan and Iraq is ~40,000.

That’s not a good number - but it’s a long way away from hundreds of thousands.

[NeedMoreTea]

Wikipedia perhaps?

"Credible estimates of Iraq War casualties range from 151,000 violent deaths as of June 2006 to 461,000 total deaths as of June 2011"

[sheepmullet]

And did the US murder all of these people?

And are all these people innocent civilians?

Wikipedia has the breakdown.