Corporations have a strong incentive not to piss off the rest of the world to serve one country. They've been able to get away with it for a while but the demands from China will naturally keep growing and growing (as all censorship does once you give in to it).
The eagerness of companies to completely abandon free speech and differing opinions will eventually have real consequences.
There is no such thing as an American company, if you're an American and you start a business and build it up then decide to retire and sell it off, it isn't guaranteed (and is actually rather unlikely) that all the production and business will stay in the US. People are American - not corporations.
Thanks to the tremendous criminality and wealth concentration of the last 200 years, western corps generally only answered to western wealthy audiences. The game has changed, that's all....
Well, at least you left out the "legally required" part. The board most certainly has a responsibility to shareholders. It can be a long and tiring argument, but from my POV there is only "responsibility" not "fiduciary responsibility". Now, most of the time the shareholders want more money. But AFAICT, there is not a law on the books that says that the board must maximize profits above all else. For instance, and perhaps it's a poor example, but Costco says they will make 15% profit. That's it. You want more money, sell more stuff. Doesn't the board have a "fiduciary responsibility" to bump that to 16% if they can get away with it? Apparently not.
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2019/10/nba-china-hong-k...
Corporations have a strong incentive not to piss off the rest of the world to serve one country. They've been able to get away with it for a while but the demands from China will naturally keep growing and growing (as all censorship does once you give in to it).
The eagerness of companies to completely abandon free speech and differing opinions will eventually have real consequences.