I know some people prefer to stick their noses up and hold what they perceive as the moral high ground, but do consider how lives of hundreds of millions of people will be affected by your actions/inactions.
Letting the CCP export its censorship back into the West in the hopes that Google will improve life in China is a hell of a gamble.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-apple-icloud-insigh...
Or how they then nationalized the company that has access to all the iCloud encryption keys for accessing Apple user messages, pictures, videos, files, etc. at rest:
https://mashable.com/article/china-government-apple-icloud-d...
Airlines only remove Taiwanese paraphernalia when flights operates in China - you know complying to domestic Chinese laws. That's completely reasonable stuff that doesn't extend beyond Chinese borders. Has Bing exported censorship back to the West. Has EU right to be forgotten even made it's way to US and Canada? This is just fear mongering.
It's easily forgotten that the nation currently lead by Donald Trump already has this power of international censorship. Doesn't even need hypothetical scenarios to be scary.
EDITS: typo
And we're already heavily tied to china's economy why would forcing just one company to not cooperate help deligitimize their government?
Though I find that as a company, this is a slippery slope that it's better not to get on in the first place.
Can Google enter China and slowly affect change? Possibly
But from the track record of China and especially what's happening in Hong Kong, cooperating seems to be just feeding the beast. There needs to be genuine interest in opening up and making a change. So far, I do not see that but perhaps one day we can get there.
I don't understand how any search engine approved in China could be "surfacing better information in queries" - they are all effectively under the same authoritative control. Are you placing your believe in hopes and prayers that real information will be "accidentally" leaked to the oppressed masses in China? How cute.
Further, there's the whole 'national security' angle. Whether real or imagined, some people don't like the idea of US entities helping foreign entities gain a competitive advantage.
Not sure how pointing to a feigned moral superiority of 'those who stick their noses up' helps your argument either.
I'm not OP but I'd consider that a very 'sticking your nose up' take on the situation. It seems to consider westerners' self-image as more important than Chinese access.
What was Google supposed to to? Show links to dead sites that don't load in the browser?
All other operational problems aside: Yes, I think that would be great! Let users know what their government is censoring.
You have a underlying lack of understanding how censorship works. They don't just block websites. The Chinese government wants to filtering out results they don't like on accessible websites.
"Vague" is a neutral way of putting it.
The laws are "whatever the party declares today. Also, whatever the party declares tomorrow."
The whole value proposition of doing business in China is a gamble that tomorrow's set of party strictures will be equal or better than today's.
(Spolier: they won't!)
And yes, "the party" isn't a single monolithic thing. It's shorthand for "whichever levels of authority have influence and interest in what you're doing."
And no, this isn't comparably similar how the US or any other democratic nation operates.
It doesn't follow to me. The reverse actually. 'laws in this area are often vague' for a reason - so that You Can't Do That becomes not a judicial matter with precise as possible definition, but a matter of personal feeling. Then the rulers can come down hard on whoever just because they didn't like something.
That's more likely to pressure companies into being on the conservative side of things; censoring a little more rather than a litte less. And google's in it for the money in a big, rich market.
Yes, Baidu already does this. But no one can do it as well as Google.
And just for context, Baidu is, currently, the only big player, and in most of the time considered to be the only player in the search engine market of Mainland China.
so, maintaining the status quo is not 'help'?
> I know some people prefer to stick their noses up and hold what they perceive as the moral high ground, but do consider how lives of hundreds of millions of people will be affected by your actions/inactions.
so which is it if one says no? sticking ones nose up or considering how the lives of millions of people will be affected by your actions/inactions?
or is it only sticking ones nose up when you disagree with the decision?
So what? That does not make censorship morally acceptable. This would be the same as saying that using slave labor is ok, if you do it in a country that already accepts slavery anyway, and you are treating you slaves better.
> And by surfacing better information for queries, it can also help people finding what they want for things that are not censored.
Once the state is performing censorship there is no such thing as "better information". If all information is filtered by the government, then all information is suspicious.
> but do consider how lives of hundreds of millions of people will be affected by your actions/inactions.
I have profound sympathy for the victims of authoritarian regimes, and I absolutely do not believe that the way to help them is to collaborate with the very system that oppresses them. Pretending otherwise sounds like Newspeak to me.
> I know some people prefer to stick their noses up and hold what they perceive as the moral high ground
Maybe some people are like that, but this is unimportant. The important thing is this: you have to put your own oxygen mask on before helping others. If we in the west allow our companies to collaborate with systems that hold values that are repugnant to our own, then we will become like those systems, not the other way around. There will be nowhere to hide. No thank you.
Let's not be naive: say what you want about the Chinese government, but they are not imbeciles. If they did not perceive Dragonfly as something that would help them maintain their repressive apparatus, they would not allow it.
I have relatives in China. Censorship is the least of their worries when the current Baidu monopoly is allowing promoted results that are sometimes flat-out evil (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Wei_Zexi).
+ copyrights
+ trademarks
+ patents(really bogus patents)
+ religion(these days, US outright ban any casual religious reference because it offend some believers, resulting modifying some manga/anime/game)
+ national security
+ ex-political party symbol(swastika, but they can't tell the difference between nazi symbol and Buddism symbol which is widely used in Japanese commercial products, especially manga/anime/game)
+ child porno(their definition includes some commercial Japanese manga/anime/game which we believe not possibly be a child porn since it's a pure fiction and no real-life human being harmed).
I believe these are also a trade barrier for Japan. But I bet you disagree some of the above points and justify the censorship because it's against your moral based on your culture.
1. Copyright, trademarks, and patents are a pretty weak argument for "censorship" IMO. But I guess I see where you're coming from. There are also many "fair-use" exceptions for these that make it less "censorship" and more "preventing profit on other people's ideas".
2. "US outright ban any casual religious reference because it offend some believers, resulting modifying some manga/anime/game" -- Can you give an example? This seems to go directly against first amendment rights.
3. "national security" -- There have been many cases where the government will work with press to attempt to stop them from releasing information that would damage national security. There have also been many cases where the press has not listened, and they're allowed to do that. What specifically are you talking about here? Direct theft of government property/information is illegal, but I would hardly call that censorship. NDAs I guess are censorship, but they are an agreement between two parties, not the government deciding arbitrarily what to censor.
4. "ex-political party symbol" -- absolutely not banned in the US.
5. Okay the last one is a fair example of censorship. I'm not familiar with the US laws on that one and frankly I don't want to find out...
> + religion(these days, US outright ban any casual religious reference because it offend some believers, resulting modifying some manga/anime/game)
Religious sensitivities run high in the U.S., but criticizing or mocking (or advocating or practicing) a religion is a core territory of legally protected speech, and people very commonly criticize other people's religions and religious beliefs, including in mass media. There is no such ban.
> + national security
This is pretty complicated, but it appears that the courts will protect the publishers (not the leakers) of leaked classified information.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_Times_Co._v._United_S...
> + ex-political party symbol(swastika, but they can't tell the difference between nazi symbol and Buddism symbol which is widely used in Japanese commercial products, especially manga/anime/game)
The U.S., differently from many European countries, does not prohibit the sale or display of swastikas, including when they are actually used to show sympathy for the Nazi Party.
> + child porno(their definition includes some commercial Japanese manga/anime/game which we believe not possibly be a child porn since it's a pure fiction and no real-life human being harmed).
There's still always a risk of obscenity prosecutions for comics in the U.S., and import restrictions on sexually explicit material are famously much more restrictive than domestic restrictions (which sounds like the very definition of a trade barrier). But there is a Supreme Court case specifically addressing attempts to ban sexual images that depict fictional children
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ashcroft_v._Free_Speech_Coalit...
The Court did not accept categorically banning these images.
this isn't done
>+ child porno(their definition includes some commercial Japanese manga/anime/game which we believe not possibly be a child porn since it's a pure fiction and no real-life human being harmed).
are you actually arguing in favor of not censoring this?
Copyrights, trademarks, and patents are not censorship, they are actually designed to encourage the exposure of information (copyrighted/trademarked/patented information is free to view, that's the foundation of the concept) by promising restrictions on third party usage of the information, which is a concern for creators who avoid sharing their knowledge for fear of theft.
The US doesn't actually have any religious censorship laws (if you know of any, please link them) that cares about offence taken by religious believers. If private creators are modifying their own creations to sell better to a US audience, that has nothing to do with US censorship.
The US grants irrevocable protections to the press in publishing even sensitive and national security critical information. The US press voluntarily consults the government on the national security impact of publishing sensitive material, but the government has no legal avenue to actually prevent the press from publishing it. Demonstrations of this are pretty famous, like the Pentagon Papers. There are also whistleblower protections.
The US has no censorship laws on political symbols like the swastika, IIRC that's specifically a German thing.
Fictional child pornography such as the commercial Japanese manga/anime/games you mentioned is explicitly allowed under US law; US law specifically carves out an exception for fictional works, and the US Supreme Court has cemented this with precedent. Note: these exceptions have definitely been weakened in recent decades by the "PROTECT Act of 2003".
Feel free to correct me on details, but a lot of censorship you list here just isn't happening in the West, and definitely isn't happening in the US where Google is physically and culturally based. The level and breadth of censorship simply isn't comparable to China's.
Furthermore, "moral based on your culture" absolutely matters. To portray censorship as okay because it's based on differing morals based on differing cultures is ridiculous. Would you approve of US-committed atrocities if it was based on US culture?
Edit: removed references to whataboutism because after reconsidering the context, I think the parent comment is less of a deflection that I initially perceived.
> + religion(these days, US outright ban any casual religious reference because it offend some believers, resulting modifying some manga/anime/game)
Where has this happened? The censorship you're describing sounds like it violates the first amendment. I think people may decide to remove religious references because it offends people, but that's not the same as the government censoring it.
> + ex-political party symbol(swastika, but they can't tell the difference between nazi symbol and Buddism symbol which is widely used in Japanese commercial products, especially manga/anime/game)
Where has this happened? Again, considering we have straight up neo Nazis in the US who are allowed to display the actual swastika legally, I don't understand how this could happen.
If Google were to refuse the Chinese terms of business, they would be barred from doing business with the largest population in the world. And the climate over there is that their government risks little political capital in banning non-compliant firms.
That's why it needs to be worked on a political level, like the post you replied to stated.
... under current international agreements and rules.
The agreements and rules change, the calculus changes. Companies optimize continuously for the current environment they find themselves in.
It depends. There are plenty of people who willingly pay more for non-Chinese goods when they can. The problem is that they often have no choice in the matter because so much is made in China.
There are lots of small manufacturing businesses new and old all across the country that are thriving because of where their stuff is made. The problem is that they can't make goods in large enough quantities to be carried in the national chain stores, so it's mostly online and word-of-mouth.
It’s easier to deploy something already built than to build a system from scratch. There is a clear civil rights argument against letting American tech companies build this technology for dictators.
If the last few years have shown anything, it's that you can get EU and US citizens to vote against their best interests using a convenient scapegoat or outgroup.
[] https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2018/10/its-not-fr...
Then the US and EU both have censorship around things protected by law. So you can sue people to take down slanderous material, or material that violates copyrights or trademarks.
Similarly, the American attitude towards copyright, trademark, and patent laws probably seems ridiculous and borderline unethical to Chinese companies looking to do business here. They seem (from the outside) to have no problem with a phone manufacturer calling itself "Applle" to piggyback on Apple's brand, but that is very illegal under American laws. Similarly, the amount of automatic filtering YouTube and other video hosts have to do under DMCA might block as much content as Chinese political auto-filtering does, although I would love to see more analysis of that.
Being from an American cultural background myself, I have an obvious set of intuitions about which of these are reasonable and which are ridiculous, but I find it hard to make a clear argument about why.
Works for me, and seems to empower the people, rather than the state...
> filtering of information related to things unsavory to the past of any given country in the EU
Could you link me to some credible sources for this?
" filtering of information related to things unsavory to the past of any given country in the EU."
Some specific reference to some EU government forcing companies to remove controversial information about their countries' past would help making your point (not saying it doesn't happen).
Foreign policy is hard and I don't pretend to know the best way to do it but I think given recent history we have to be more careful about how we try to influence developing nations so that we actually have the effect we want. This might include doing things that could seem unpalatable in the short term.
But let's be perfectly clear that the Chinese did this out of censorship and the trade part happened to be a side-effect.
Seems we'd best be served to first collectively realize this. Then do as you suggest.
If you believe your system is better, then you really should not have to actively participate in fighting opposing systems of belief. Forcing it through just shows that you are motivated by self interest, and not a core belief in the superiority of your own values. Such a strategy will lose the hearts and minds of the people of China as well, and at which point who are you protecting the rights and interests of anymore if those who you seek to “help” aren’t even on your side?
We tried the hug approach when China was prematurely let into the WTO. That backfired.
Our concern should be, first and foremost, with our own morality. Helping a dictator repress billions of people is wrong, against our values, and should not tolerated by people in our society.
What’s the alternative? Only other censored search engines. And Chinese people know baidu search results suck ass compared to google’s.
So basically the western commentariat killing off dragonfly has a demonstrably negative impact on Chinese quality of life.
But we’re only trying to protect the freedoms of oppressed Chinese people, right?
It doesn't matter who it is, whether it's NSA or Russia or Sweden if Google is cooperating with them in unethical ways you should do something about it. Apathy and a blind eye is why corporations can get away with working people to death so we can live in comfort. People may have excuses for that but there is no excuse for allowing them to go so far as what has been written in dystopia literature.
Also just step back for a moment and try to think of scenarios in which people would have to apply your "don't fight opposing systems". I feel you will find it does not apply to a great many things.
Uh why ? I think it's exactly the opposite
Action must be taken.
It seems this is governed by these standards, but I failed to dig up a copy of them. Is it true that any western company offering a mainland Chinese version of their product exposes these interfaces?
YD/T 2248-2015 - 互联网数据中心和互联网接入服务信息安全管理系统技术要求 - Interface requirements of information security management system for Internet data center/Internet service provider
YD/T 2406-2017 - 互联网数据中心和互联网接入服务信息安全管理系统及接口测试方法 - Test specifications of information security management system & interface for Internet data center/Internet service provider
YD/T 3212-2017 - 内容分发网络服务信息安全管理系统接口规范 - Interface standard of information security management system for content delivery network service
YD/T 3213-2017 - 内容分发网络服务信息安全管理系统及接口测试方法 - Test specifications of information security management system for content delivery network service
YD/T 3214-2017 - 互联网资源协作服务信息安全管理系统接口规范 - Interface specification for information security management of Internet resource collaboration service
YD/T 3215-2017 - 互联网资源协作服务信息安全管理系统及接口测试方法 - Test methods of information security management system for Internet resource collaboration service
A WFOE = Wholly Foreign-Owned Enterprise is allowed for manufacturing (which I assume Tesla regulates under), but not for Telecom companies where 51% still applies. Internet services seem even worse based on a cursory reading:
(42) No foreign investor is allowed to invest in Internet news services, Internet publishing services, Internet audio-visual program services, Internet culture operation (except music), Internet access service establishments, and services of information release to the public through Internet (except those under China's commitment to opening up to the outside world in its entry into the WTO).Both have stopped happening so many times that the only thing I'm sure about is that they will stop again sometime soon.
Companies don't have ethical standards, only slick PR departments.
Even on HN posts talking about how Apple sells privacy as a product are upvoted and reach > 1000 upvotes.
But when Google all but removed the don't be evil thing from the work of conduct guidelines, that should have been a huge red flag that the company is no longer interested in "educating" its employees on this kind of ethics, and would prefer that its new employees treat the one and only leftover mention of Don't be evil in the work of conduct as what it really is now - a way for Google to say that it's still in there somewhere, and nothing more. The Don't be evil spirit within work of conduct guidelines is gone.
so that's probably never going to be 'terminated'
Don’t get too excited; they haven’t announced a lack of participation in PRISM yet.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jun/06/us-tech-giants...
"I’m not sure I can say this more clearly: we’re not in cahoots with the NSA and there’s is no government program that Google participates in that allows the kind of access that the media originally reported. Note that I say “originally” because you’ll see that many of those original sources corrected their articles after it became clear that the PRISM slides were not accurate. Now, what does happen is that we get specific requests from the government for user data. We review each of those requests and push back when the request is overly broad or doesn’t follow the correct process. There is no free-for-all, no direct access, no indirect access, no back door, no drop box."
https://venturebeat.com/2013/06/19/google-issues-clearest-st...
(I work at Google, not in a relevant role.)
Some argue this is just Google following local laws. I say that being legal != being moral and helping the government of China censor and track citizens is not a moral position, law be damned. The amount of internal resistance this got is good evidence of this project not being consistent with the values of most of the people who work there.
The fact that leadership tried to hide this project, keep it secret and deny its existence is... disappointing.
Then again, I already had the opinion that Sundar is the most overpaid CEO in the world.
Technology is driving confrontations with our values, our ideas of what it means to be human.
Organlegging was science fiction, now it's happening.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organlegging
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organ_theft
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organ_transplantation_in_China
"What kind of future do we want?", is no longer the question, because it's here, now.
1) the internal decision making process involving this project
2) personnel who are responsible for initiating / approving the project
3) how many resources have been put into this project
4) the exact content (data sources, roadmap, goals, etc.) of this project
5) how far this project went
6) where the product / data is stored, how will they be handled when the project is terminated
7) how many of the project outputs have being provided to the Chinese government
8) the details of Chinese government involvement into this project
Also, not limited to Google, any U.S. company helps any authoritarian government doing censorship needs to be investigated.
BTW, I got lots of downvotes from comments criticizing China.
Microsoft is run like a regular company where employees just do what they're told.
The main differences can be summarized as "rule of law" versus "rule of people". Also connections with someone in the upper levels of gov't are paramount for any company looking to make it big.
Source: Chinese family members.
Under Xi, there is zero chance Google can have a public service offering in any way, considering its history.
To the Chinese people here on HN try to understand that this is larger than the welfare of the Chinese.
China is now in a position to export its culture to the rest of the world due to its economic strength.
It can, for example, force companies like Google to censor information to the rest of the world and this is a fact.
How do I know this? Because us EU citizens already have to suffer the US views on sex and nudity, among others and the US has the strongest free speech protections of all countries.
The whataboutism on this discussion btw is interesting since this forum would be censored in China and this conversation wouldn't be possible. There's no comparison to be made in terms of free speech. In China you have none.
So I regret the situation, but many of us value our liberal freedoms and we don't want China to export its flavor of communism to us.
Yes I was born and raised in an ex-communist country, I know communism when I see it, I don't want any and I'm prepared to fight for my freedoms.
I do hope to see China become a liberal democracy. But I'm not holding my breath, because I also know what it takes for a revolution to happen and China won't be there for the foreseeable future.
[0] RFS 9: Kill Hollywood https://twitter.com/paulg/status/160491053080776706
[1] 2012 Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3491542
https://web.archive.org/web/20120127114157/http://ycombinato...
Bitcoin only. Tether only in high amounts.
I might be confused on the name, and can't look up Crypto stuff at work. Please correct me if I'm wrong.
Yay, capitalism. Where no one's to blame and everything's always on fire.
YouTube has arbitrary content policies which seem to mirror whatever the Democratic party wants. From China's POV they want the same thing except they call their party the Communist party.
Guys like Dennis Prager are trying to run a YouTube channel with conservative viewpoints and are finding it impossible to do so without obstacles. I don't think there is a single channel that is right of center which is not mistreated by YouTube.
Politics aside, let's look at political correctness. On YouTube you cannot be critical about a class of people because of their immigration status. I watched a documentary about of smuggling of illegal immigrants from North Africa into Europe. They showed footage of a guy who couldn't go out into his own farm at night because smugglers would trespass on his property en route to the shore where the boats were. The documentary was one of those "live" launches on YouTube. Conveniently the live launch was bugged out. I had to refresh the page an hour after I realized it didn't release.
24 hours later it was banned by YouTube.
So I ask again, is it only Chinese censorship that western society has a problem with?