[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.