[seemuch]

This is a very common way of looking at this problem, and I find it absurd: Google is creating this "for the Chinese government". How about for the Chinese users? I for one am a Chinese use, and I would love to be able to use Google in China.

[whizzkid]

Quite the contrary, I think Chinese people would benefit much more if Google would refuse to build a search engine with cencorship.

By accepting their rules, Google would validate the cencorship that government is forcing to their citizens, and government could easily tell to their people: "Look, whole world is agreeing with me and what I am doing."

By not accepting to build it, Chinese people will always have the upper hand in the argument, and something to reference it to.

[seemuch]

I think you need to stop telling Chinese people what they need. We know what we need. As long as there is still cencorship, we will always have something for the argument. More to the point, an argument is not even what we need the most right now. It is not even close to the top of the list. We need the best search engine in the world much more than an argument with the government.

Looking at your comment makes me feel that it is not the Chinese people who are afraid of "losing an argument". If anybody, it is you. You believe so deeply in the evilness of Chinese government, that you are afraid your evidences are drifting away from you.

Just a hypothesis. No offense.

[kodablah]

> I think you need to stop telling Chinese people what they need. We know what we need.

Surely it's understandable from the outside looking in why people can't see what the Chinese people want/need. If you can't publicly post those "argument" you speak of under your name for fear of reprisal, how is anyone supposed to know any better?

I think the comment speculates because it's all they can do because it's less about "losing an argument" and more about not even knowing whether an argument exists. In the absence of clear feelings towards something (or the ability to state them), you should expect people to speculate and not be surprised when they are wrong.

[whizzkid]

Im sorry that my comment made you feel this way. I was not trying to win any argument here. My comment above would be my reaction if it would happen to me.

I think it helps to brainstorm all the aspects of a problem. Of course, I can not say what you need specifically, you are right about that.

> If anybody, it is you. You believe so deeply in the evilness...

Btw, this feels more like an attack than a hypothesis, just saying.

[seemuch]

I am very sorry to make you feel attacked. I honestly did not mean that. I really appreciate you still being able to stay cool even when you feel offended.

[whizzkid]

It is healthy to disagree with each other as long as it does not get personal with assumptions. Thanks for the discussion :)

[fizwhiz]

It confounds me that people who are not natively Chinese, or have never lived there, or ever used the existing search infrastructure (ex: Baidu) make sweeping claims with such confidence that they truly know what's best for Chinese people.

[hueving]

You don't have to directly suffer from genocide to know genocide is bad.

[fizwhiz]

Please unpack for me how opening up Google Search in China precipitates genocide.

[int_19h]

It does so by censoring information about what's going on in Tibet and Xinjiang, for example.

[jsgo]

maybe from a philosophical standpoint, but in the end then the Chinese people don't have access to Google.

The options in China are similarly censored. So it isn't like Google would be engaged in something that is an outright negative for the end Chinese user.

Maybe people prefer Google to Baidu/Bing/whatever. So if you are getting the same x results from Baidu, Bing, Google, etc. but you prefer Google's experience/filtering/page rank/whatever, are you hindered in any meaningful way beyond what you were already by using the censored version of them?

[whizzkid]

You are right on having a preference that Chinese people would like much more over "Baidu/Bing/whatever". I will give you that. But let's look at it from another perspective.

What stops then some other country to have the exact same exception for themselves? If you can do it for China, surely you can do it for us, right? Legally, this would work.

This situation has a risk of building a dangerous base against freedom :/

[anticensor]

You are unmeasurably right. Some people still continue to defend censor in spite of all these; I tell them this will also be abused against them. See my username.

[jsgo]

I don't think it is a situation that people are for censorship so much as they don't see any net benefit in avoiding a market that does do censorship.

Google was in China at one point. They took a stand and got out. Since then, Android has taken over the world. Also in that time, China has become one of the, if not the, biggest markets in mobile. So Google's creation, Android, is being sold within China completely divorced of everything that makes Google commit to Android in the first place. They've really gained nothing except a moral victory during this period and have lost considerably for said stand.

Feels really weird defending Google to be really honest, but in this particular case, I understand the decision to release a censored Google there. They fought the government and the government won.

[seemuch]

If some other country ask for something similar, then Google should either give them or quit that country. Simple as that. If Google, or any company, wants to operate in a country, they need to obey their laws.

It is not like Google has not done it before: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_by_Google

[whizzkid]

I am genuinely little confused here. Are you defending cencorship?

[seemuch]

I don't think all the cencorship out there are good; and I don't think all of them are bad as well. More importantly, I don't think my view on cencorship is the point here. My point is, Google should not be the one who fight against any laws.

As an example, in Saudi Arabia, all women are required to wear an abaya a long black cloak that covers all, but the hands and face in public. [1] Is that a good law? I don't know. But if Google wants to do business there, e.g. some female Google employee went on business trip in Saudi Arabia, she needs to obey the law there. Of course Google can choose not to do any business in Saudi Arabia. Google can even exits Saudi Arabia as a sign of protesting this law. But if I were a Saudi Arabia resident who would suffer from lack of access to information online, I would certainly hope Google does not do this.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Culture_of_Saudi_Arabia#Dress

[jldugger]

They have one, it's called google.com. It works as well for Chinese users as it does anyone else on the planet. The entity that disapproves of this is the Chinese government, hence designing to suit the government's needs.

[resters]

Exactly. The parent comment underscores the patronizing and disrespectful view of the Chinese people implicit in the anti-Dragonfly rhetoric.

It also notes the bias that the Chinese Government is the customer, and the people just hapless victims of that government.

This disrespect of the agency of the Chinese people is being used as it always is, to justify an over-simplified, binary, political type of moral indignation.

The warning sign should be the emotion of indignation over foreign politics. It’s a clue that one is probably wrong.

[int_19h]

An authoritarian oppressive government that has the support of the majority of the population is still an authoritarian and oppressive government. Whether the people are its victims or its enablers is irrelevant to the ethics of the situation here. Either it's okay to aid and abet political repression, or it's not. If it's not, then it's not okay to assist China, regardless of what the majority of its populace thinks about that (you can always find the minority that has a very different opinion - start with the inmates of those labor camps...).

Conversely, if Chinese users want Google, and if they're not just hapless victims of their government, then they're welcome to put pressure on said government to stop censoring google.com.

[resters]

> An authoritarian oppressive government that has the support of the majority of the population is still an authoritarian and oppressive government.

This is indeed the neoconservative view. An analogous statement by a sectarian neoconservative might be "A heathen government that has the support of the majority of people is still a heathen government".

> Either it's okay to aid and abet political repression, or it's not.

Binary, over-simplification.

What is political repression? Does America's Gitmo count? Our imprisonment of nonviolent drug offenders? Our criminalization of sex work? How is it that the source of all the righteous indignation happens to lie on the other side of the world?

> ...they're not just hapless victims of their government, then they're welcome to put pressure on said government

So the Chinese people are being tested now to see if they have the mettle to demand a free society in the image of the USA? Your remark actually supports my point that the neoconservative view entails judgment (and the process of dehumanization) of the population that is first framed as victims, then shamed for not prioritizing one political cause above all else.

Note, the idea that China should adopt policies in the image of the USA is where the neocon view merges with the white supremacist view. The idea that the precise nuances of Western democracy are innately superior due to the unique cultural circumstances that gave rise to the US, making them less likely to occur elsewhere.

[brianpgordon]

The notion that the Chinese people actually have agency in choosing their government and that they want it this way is so far beyond ludicrous that I hardly know how to respond. How can you say that about a government that imprisons political dissidents and suppresses any information that could be a threat to its authoritarian rule? China is a one-party state with a supreme leader for life. So what are you talking about?!

[resters]

I think you are buying into two major fallacies and succumbing to one major bias. First, the fallacies:

- The fallacy that leaders, even dictators, have anything resembling absolute power or are able to govern without some degree of consensus from other powerful interests within the country.

- The fallacy that a system with two very similar parties (such as in the US) is significantly different from a nation with a single party.

The bias is the idea that there is something more sinister about the reported information suppression activity being done by China than is done in the US. States must do this to maintain/launder their reputation/legitimacy in the eyes of the majority.

Look how the US has treated Julian Assange. If anything, China simply has more people with the level of courage necessary to take the kind of risks that Assange took and must in some ways apply authoritarian power to stop it.

[int_19h]

> What is political repression? Does America's Gitmo count? Our imprisonment of nonviolent drug offenders? Our criminalization of sex work?

That is for everybody to answer on their own, in a way that is consistent with their ethical principles on other things.

> How is it that the source of all the righteous indignation happens to lie on the other side of the world?

Because the people who are doing these things for China live on this side of the world, and are mostly American citizens. So we judge them for what they do in China by American standards.

> So the Chinese people are being tested now to see if they have the mettle to demand a free society in the image of the USA?

It's not a test. The Chinese people (or their government) can demand whatever society they want. What they don't get to demand is American engineers helping them build a society that is build on foundations that are unethical by American standards. And what we get do demand is that American engineers are not complicit in this.

By your standards, it sounds like castigating IBM for helping German govt with Holocause was also "neoconservative" - after all, how dare we judge their society for what they do to some unfortunate people with broad popular support?

[resters]

> society that is build on foundations that are unethical by American standards.

I acknowledge the truth of this point, but I would argue that Google engineers are helping the US Government build a society that is unethical by American standards. I will include some examples below (though this is not the main point of my reply).

> By your standards, it sounds like castigating IBM for helping German govt with Holocause was also "neoconservative" - after all, how dare we judge their society for what they do to some unfortunate people with broad popular support?

I see how the example of IBM looms large as a lesson from history on what tech companies should strive to avoid doing. It is my understanding that the logistics of the Nazi genocide would not have been possible without IBM technology, and that top officials at IBM had reason to know how the technology was being used.

But I'd argue that the main reason IBM sold the technology to the German government was not corporate greed causing a moral blind spot, it was simply that the actions of the German government were not viewed at the time as out of bounds. Nations had been rounding up and isolating "troublesome" minority populations throughout history. It is/was in effect an aspect of running a state.

My point here is that choices that are uncontroversial and broadly morally acceptable turn into things that are later viewed as having been abhorrent. It used to be the case that one form of compensation to soldiers after they fought a battle was that they were allowed to rape, etc. It used to be morally acceptable for a husband to dole out corporal punishment toward his wife and children. People who did these things did them with a clean conscience, and were respected and upstanding members of society.

Some kinds of technology are ripe for abuse by governments. I'd argue that for the most part, any product that is useful for advertising is ripe for abuse. Google and Facebook are thus both creating tech that offers the ideal suite of services for governments to abuse.

How might governments abuse the services? China demanding censorship is one way, but the US Government has many points of access and influence into Google and Facebook, to the point where I'd argue the scope and reach of US government abuses goes well beyond search result censorship and much more closely resembles the kind of social credit system China has also been derided for aspiring to build.

Just to give a few examples, neither Google or Facebook offers any sort of warrant canary for user account data, and both have created custom interfaces for government officials with warrants to use to undertake unfettered data mining of public and private information about users, as well as the extensive metadata that both firms collect for ad targeting purposes.

Recently, Facebook has been blamed for allowing so-called election meddling to occur and "not responding soon enough". Since the election meddling was simply spending money on ads that supported various fringe political groups, we can infer that what the US Government is asking for is the ability to suppress such content if it gets too popular for any reason, not just that the ad impressions were paid for in Russian currency or the transaction originated somewhere geographically close to Russia.

If there has ever been a scenario ripe for abuse this is it.

Surely similar conversations are going on at Google, but thanks to the cozy relationship with government established by Eric Schmidt, the mechanics of the content suppression mechanism were uncontroversial and have been available to government for a while.

If we put on our sci-fi hats for a moment and imagine a sci-fi description of an algorithmic "feed" such as the FB news feed or a Google search results page. Inevitably we realize that of course the government will dictate a lot about how the algorithm works.

We get a glimpse into the liability angle by looking at Tesla's "auto pilot" algorithms. Just as Zuck admitted that FB should "probably be regulated", Tesla has the same ultimate desire with respect to auto-pilot algorithms. If someone is killed by a self-driving car, it's extremely useful to eliminate any negligence that might be found in the software design or QA process, since liability would rest there and the firm(s) responsible would have to pay whenever someone was killed.

But by allowing the algorithm to be regulated, liability can rest somewhere else and not with the most risky and experimental aspect of the car's safety.

Notably, regulators are irate about Facebook's handling of Russian ad spend, as well as about any self-driving vehicle that crashes. Why? Because it is the threat of liability that most effectively nudges the firms toward allowing the government more and more control over the algorithmic details.

So I think the biggest threat is the US Government's surveillance programs and cozy relationship with big silicon valley firms. There will always be well funded groups trying to find any way to criticize or embarrass China. Among them is Trump who started a trade war and has scapegoated China as the reason the US rust belt economy is weak.

So while there is plenty of reason to be concerned about China's treatment of its citizens, the rhetoric used to express that concern is of great benefit to the neocons who are fanning the flames of conflict.

Thus it is preferable to find a way to achieve the moral objective you cite without further empowering US warmongers/neocons.

One suggestion I have is to simply offer an uncensored version of China Google hosted in the US outside the Great Firewall. Then, if someone were to search for 天安門廣場 on both systems and a few results on page 1 are missing, it will be completely obvious what the Chinese government wants censored.

I actually created this the last time Google had a presence in China and was excited to create mechanisms to easily crawl and distribute the censored data, but then Google pulled back from China (for competitive, not ethical reasons at the time) and so there was no use for it anymore.

[fumar]

I see. I don't mean to offend but wanted to better understand the situation. It makes sense to me that Chinese folks want access to Google's search engine, and the only path forward is for Google to work with the government.

From your perspective, is the Chinese government the one who is compromising in order to give its citizen access to a tool?

[seemuch]

I don't see it as "Google working with the government", I see it as "Google obeying laws of China". Honestly, I did not really understand your question. It would be helpful if you elaborate a little bit. Thanks!

[HumanDrivenDev]

I think google should not be in China for the same reason - so Chinese users do not have it. Let them see how cut off and backwards they are - stuck using second rate clones like baidu - due to the communist party.

[ychen306]

They know that (whether they are fine with it is another matter). Google was in China from 2006 to 2010, and pulled out partly due to censorship (among other reasons).