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Apple’s Silence in China Sets a Dangerous Precedent

nytimes.com

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Re: Apple’s Silence in China Sets a Dangerous Precedent

#71

Post by ttflee »

adventured wrote: post #23
justicezyx wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Chinese companies, however, have no such limitations, and will bend the rules all the time, often with minimal consequences. Do you mind point some examples?

Jack Ma stealing tens of billions of dollars from Softbank and Yahoo by giving himself a very large stake in Ant Financial (completely unsupported by his ownership % in Alibaba), divesting it out of Alibaba without proper compensation. Something like that is nearly unthinkable in the US or Western Europe. It would be equivalent to Jeff Bezos spinning off AWS and giving himself 2/3 ownership of it, without approval fr…

Rumors said that Alibaba's IPO involved Boyu Capital. Jiang Zhicheng, the grandson of former President Jiang Zemin, was stake holder of the latter one. No wonder why Alibaba got through all the obstacles establishing its payment service under a murky supervision in early 2000s.

[1] http://www.investopedia.com/articles/investing/081214/5-thin...

Re: Apple’s Silence in China Sets a Dangerous Precedent

#72

Post by [deleted] »

adventured wrote: post #23
justicezyx wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Chinese companies, however, have no such limitations, and will bend the rules all the time, often with minimal consequences. Do you mind point some examples?

Jack Ma stealing tens of billions of dollars from Softbank and Yahoo by giving himself a very large stake in Ant Financial (completely unsupported by his ownership % in Alibaba), divesting it out of Alibaba without proper compensation. Something like that is nearly unthinkable in the US or Western Europe. It would be equivalent to Jeff Bezos spinning off AWS and giving himself 2/3 ownership of it, without approval fr…

[deleted]

Re: Apple’s Silence in China Sets a Dangerous Precedent

#73

Post by mstaoru »

Privacy concerns aside, without running VPN half of the "allowed" (i.e. not explicitly banned) Western Internet is completely unusable thanks to Google CDN, Google Fonts, Facebook Retargeting, Twitter panels etc. any of which stall the loading forever and the content never shows in Safari / Mobile Chrome. Many hybrid apps are unusable as well. Thankfully they didn't remove manual VPN configuration. Just made it all even more inconvenient.

Re: Apple’s Silence in China Sets a Dangerous Precedent

#74

Post by npunt »

Worth pointing out that this happened on the same day that TestFlight increases the number of beta testers from 2k to 10k. If someone open sources an iOS VPN app, you've now got 10k people that can sideload an app via the efforts of a single person with an apple developer account.

Obviously this is a loophole and not meant as a mainstream solution, but past solutions to getting around the great firewall (including VPN itself) have also been only for the technically informed and connected - often foreigners working in China. Basically it lets the technical elite have a way around the firewall to keep business running.

Personally I think it's unlikely these two bits of news are connected (upping testflight is likely about iOS 11), but still it may have a positive effect until it, too, is clamped down on.

Re: Apple’s Silence in China Sets a Dangerous Precedent

#75

Post by Clubber »

mcone wrote: post #54
IBM wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Imagine what would happened, for instance, if Apple hadn't pushed back against the FBI. Their customers would have been enraged, just as they are now. They absolutely would not have. HN-types might have, but many of them were also enraged about many of Apple's business practices over the years including their App Store policies, not being "open", etc. And it hasn't had any measurable impact on Apple's success as a b…

> They absolutely would not have. Perhaps not. But Apple absolutely benefited from the overwhelmingly positive press coverage it received as a result of their decision to oppose the FBI. And when the FBI withdrew their request, Apple looked like the winner. So yes, I do believe they opposed the FBI in that instance to strengthen their brand.

Trump called for a boycott on Apple because of that, and that was when he was somewhat credible. It was a bad short term play financially, but I believe it was a good long term play. Apple plays the long game, one of the few public companies that still do. What they bought is that I believe Apple implements more security and privacy measures in their phone than any of the competition, and actively improve it as a priority.

http://www.cnn.com/2016/02/19/politics/donald-trump-apple-bo...

Remember this document? Apple was the last company to be subverted either willingly nor not. I'll bet it pissed Cook the hell of that Apple was even on this list. I believe they completely revamped their cloud architecture after that.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/special/politics/prism-...

Re: Apple’s Silence in China Sets a Dangerous Precedent

#76

Post by maus42 »

AndyMcConachie wrote: post #60

What dangerous precedent? That Apple is a company that is governed by the rule of law? I find it fundamentally strange that we expect our corporate overlords to do anything other than maximize their profits. I'd certainly like them to do more than that, but I don't have the expectation that they will. And expecting them to break the law, or leave the Chinese market, is simply just crazy. It sucks that China treats it…

>I find it fundamentally strange that we expect our corporate overlords to do anything other than maximize their profits.

There is difference between what we can realistically expect people to do (often, not much, and even after accounting for that, still disappoint) and what they should do and we should expect them do (do what is right).

To continue with the illustrative examples from fiction. Nobody expects Theoden to do much anything useful after listening to all that poison of pouring out of mouth of the Wormtongue. But is it what he should be doing?

Re: Apple’s Silence in China Sets a Dangerous Precedent

#77

Post by Clubber »

partisan wrote: post #34

The day after Apple stands up to the Chinese government, Foxconn will be producing phones that no longer have the Apple logo, but will otherwise be Apple iPhones. There is nothing Apple can do. In the name of profits, they have put their entire business in the hands of the Chinese government.

Also, China is 1/3 of their sales. It's not only profits but probably long term survival.

Re: Apple’s Silence in China Sets a Dangerous Precedent

#78

Post by maus42 »

thundergolfer wrote: post #57
maus42 wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, if you are an US citizen, you can argue that it should be US government's job to represent your ideals in the wider world. But your government is not the only party responsible for representing your moral or political positions in the world. For example, the US government collectively is not particularly famous for 100% morally upstanding behavior. Granted, the US behaves often better than other great powers, a…

Spot on. The US Government is supposed to represent the people, and thus must uphold that people's values. The US government is a moral agent. A person is a moral agent. Though many here are happy to concede the reality that Apple is comprised of individuals and that it exists as an organisation as a part of society, and just view it as a profit-maximising entity. This is perverse. A corporation is a moral agent, and…

>A corporation is a moral agent

I otherwise agree, but I don't know if Apple is a moral agent - that discussion will into quite complex philosophical issues. But certainly each individual person making decisions at Apple is a moral agent.

Re: Apple’s Silence in China Sets a Dangerous Precedent

#79

Post by Clubber »

differentView wrote: post #63
partisan wrote: post #34

The day after Apple stands up to the Chinese government, Foxconn will be producing phones that no longer have the Apple logo, but will otherwise be Apple iPhones. There is nothing Apple can do. In the name of profits, they have put their entire business in the hands of the Chinese government.

>The day after Apple stands up to the Chinese government, Foxconn will be producing phones that no longer have the Apple logo, but will otherwise be Apple iPhones. That's just silly. Foxconn would do nothing of the sort.

They would if the Chinese government ordered them to as a retaliatory measure. I'm sure that wasn't off the table when they were discussing it.

Re: Apple’s Silence in China Sets a Dangerous Precedent

#80

Post by rayiner »

sriku wrote: post #12

Apple stood for privacy in the US where privacy is part of law. It didn't stand by privacy in China where privacy in some forms is prohibited as part of law. Asserting the US law in China would discount China's sovereignty, implicitly declaring "your principles are inferior to ours". A global company needs to be sensitive to these political/cultural differences and accommodate them. Even in the US where "privacy" is…

> A global company needs to be sensitive to these political/cultural differences and accommodate them.

Global companies are instrumental in transmitting western values to the rest of the world. You can't antagonize host countries but at the same time you can't ignore the arc of the moral universe.

Domestically, a great example is the economic repercussion for southern states that tried to pass trans bathroom laws. Companies didn't worry about "respecting political/cultural differences." They did what was right.

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