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by DanielGee
2864 days ago
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Why is the assumption always that AMZN, GOOG and MSFT doesn't want censorship? Especially when they have taken to censorship like duck to water. Why is the assumption that when given a "binary choice", entities like China, EU, etc would give in to tech companies? Especially when these companies so easily succumbed to US government/media pressure at home where we have a strong tradition of free speech? When a binary choice is created, it's the companies that have given in, not the state. Why are these tech companies being portrayed as being on the side of "good", while nations are portrayed as being on the side of "bad". The idea that AMZN, GOOG and MSFT have chinese, european or anyone else's best interest at heart while the PRC, EU or any other state doesn't. Did the british east india company have india's best interest at heart compared to mughal india? Considering how suspiciously we view foreign companies ( especially chinese tech companies ), it's odd that we view our own so highly. |
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But I don't think Google is evil, in the sense of doing bad things because they're bad. At a low resolution, I think it responds to incentives and tries to make as much money as it can get away with. At a higher resolution, it's made up of a lot of people and smaller groups that each have their own incentives to follow, and whose goals don't exactly line up with Google's.
Fighting censorship is nice for PR, supporting censorship is bad for PR. Some (not all!) ways of supporting censorship might help make more money, but good PR also helps make more money, so it's a trade-off. Drawing attention to Google's ability to fight censorship slightly shifts that trade-off.
But not all of Google's decisions are made centrally. Many (almost all, I would guess) people in Google are well-meaning, and I expect they can get away with making good decisions a lot of the time. The people working on TLS probably aren't individually pro-censorship just because they work for Google, which means they may not make pro-censorship decisions unless specifically pressured to.