[Fricken]

I really don't understand what people are upset about. Whether or not Google rolls out a censored search engine in China has no influence at all whatsoever in any way shape or form over whether or not the communist party will continue to enforce censorship. If Google backs out for political reasons, it's not like the party is going to suddenly see the error of their ways and do an about face on censorship.

It's just business. Americans has been doing business with China, and the Chinese people for decades. In spite of the fact that the west and China are beholden to very different identities, we can still cooperate on things to the benefit of everyone.

People are 99% the same everywhere, but the 1% that makes us different are matters of identity, and that's what we gripe about and go to war over. It's kind of stupid if you ask me, but then again, no one in the history of the world has ever come up with a reliable solution for human nature.

[emptybits]

> we can still cooperate on things to the benefit of everyone

Yes. What is the benefit of hobbling a world-class search engine so that it intentionally prevents "everyone" (I include Chinese citizens in your "everyone") from accessing free information and news and facts about the world and about China itself?

All countries are guilty of mistakes and atrocities. So what is the benefit of preventing citizens from discovering this, learning from it, and discussing it?

[RichardCA]

If Google ever rolls out a search engine where if you type "Tiananmen Square" you get back nothing of value, but your identifying info goes into some government watch list, people will remember that. It's disingenuous to pretend it's not important. And whoever authorized that will have to live with themselves and what they did.

[ardy42]

> I really don't understand what people are upset about. Whether or not Google rolls out a censored search engine in China has no influence at all whatsoever in any way shape or form over whether or not the communist party will continue to enforce censorship.

I'll list out some of the issues:

1. The view the censorship is immoral. The argument that "we should help them because we can profit and they'll do it with or without us" has some very serious flaws that can be easily shown by a few thought experiments.

For instance: your colleague is going to rob a bank and there's nothing you can do to stop him, is it right for you to volunteer to drive the getaway car since he'll pay you handsomely if you do? If you don't drive, someone else will, and you'll be leaving money on the table.

> It's just business. Americans has been doing business with China, and the Chinese people for decades. In spite of the fact that the west and China are beholden to very different identities, we can still cooperate on things to the benefit of everyone.

2. Doing business with China gives the Communist Party leverage to influence corporate operations elsewhere for ideological reasons. They've shown increasing willingness to use that influence to push their political views (for a recent example, see the recent situation with how foreign airlines represent Taiwan on their foreign-language websites).

Imagine, ten years from now, Google because popular and profitable in mainland China. The Communist Party wants to manage Western perceptions of an issue (say Tibet) and gives Google an ultimatum: derank all pro-Tibet independence websites from the top 20 results of certain Tibet-related searches, or they'll shutdown their Chinese operations. What choice do you think the shareholder-value maximizing corporation is going to make?

This article tackles the topic from a different angle: https://foreignpolicy.com/2018/10/11/if-the-u-s-doesnt-contr...

[Fricken]

It's funny, we get upset that China censors the free and open exchange of ideas until the subject of intellectual property comes up, and then we get upset because China doesn't respect the fact that we like to keep ideas under lock and key. Once you get under all the bullshit it's as simple as America believing that it should win and China should lose. The problem is, that by merit of demographics, and China's stable political and economic system, they're on track to become the dominant and economic power in the world, and there's not a lot you can do about it.

You can worry that China could have too much leverage over Google if they become dependent on profits earned in China. It's corroborated in the article you provided:

>a deeply conservative Pence sounded like liberal stalwart Sen. Elizabeth Warren in arguing the Chinese are using America’s own short-term-oriented financial system against it.

Our shareholder value short-term oriented financial system is a problem in our own backyard, something we can do something about rather than fearmongering against China. It remains a strict hypothetical that that Google would kowtow to China's demands and censor it's domestic search engine. I don't think they'll do that, but even if they did, we can cross that bridge when we get to it, until then it's just a hypothetical worst case scenario. If Google has a dangerous amount of control over the flow of information, that's because it's the service that most Americans choose to use, which is kind of the shitty thing about a free and open society. In China if they decide something is a net negative, they can stop it.