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Joining Apple, Amazon’s China Cloud Service Bows to Censors

nytimes.com

31–40 of 175 posts

Re: Joining Apple, Amazon’s China Cloud Service Bows to Censors

#31
post #19

What are they supposed to do? Either they comply or they leave the Chinese market. It's that simple. I hope people don't fault these companies for playing ball with a communist government.

They do have influence here (in US) and there (in China). They should certainly comply with law and push for change together with US government. If change is not happening and laws aren't just then they certainly should leave.

Certainly should leave?

Re: Joining Apple, Amazon’s China Cloud Service Bows to Censors

#32
post #3

fyi AWS China is different from aws worldwide. It has its own portal https://www.amazonaws.cn , different set of services, policies, etc. Many cool fancy new features on aws worldwide is not available on aws china. Some of the differences even breaks third party libraries. e.g. some version of boto.

Does it belong to Amazon.com or does it not?

Re: Joining Apple, Amazon’s China Cloud Service Bows to Censors

#33
I'm glad everyone is so anti-censorship in this thread! Should tech companies also ignore censorship at the hands of European governments or Canada via "right to be forgotten" legislation? I seem to recall people on this site saying that it would be wrong for tech companies to resist the government in those cases. At least China isn't attempting to force censorship in other countries, unlike the Canadian government.

Re: Joining Apple, Amazon’s China Cloud Service Bows to Censors

#35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I haven't heard of any such lawsuit against Google.

Google wasn't giving up too much in China. The search engine wasn't getting much tractions, based on differing asthetics. Chinese websites are far more clustered and busy - take a look at https://world.taobao.com/ . I guess that it's being shifted - baidu seems relatively uncluttered, but the Chinese aesthetic is cramming as much information as possible on the same web page.

>but the Chinese aesthetic is cramming as much information as possible on the same web page

I suspect that the language just simply looks busy to people who aren't fluent/native, even if you know enough to actually read it. I had the same complaint in Japan, even though I could read most of it. At the same time, even in English, a large complaint on here is that most redesigns simply result in a dumbed down design with less information density.

Re: Joining Apple, Amazon’s China Cloud Service Bows to Censors

#36
post #25
post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed. In China, the government controls the flow of money. Sadly, there's a saying among us Chinese netizens: "China is now powerful/rich enough, that no one can actually save us from it."

China is a giant corporation-like kleptocracy, the product of which is the labour of Chinese people. Now that the population that output cheap labour wanes as the demographic data deteriorates. Situations will change.

Unlikely. Even now China has a surplus of 300 to 400 million people that work as subsistence farmers. There's nothing else for them to do. China's manufacturing is no longer expanding meaningfully. They have a truly massive supply of inexpensive labor still accordingly; however those people working as impoverished farmers have nowhere to go, and are held in place by the government, with no rights to property ownership of the farming land (which is also why China's farming productivity is so horrendous, it's intentional).

They have hundreds of millions of people living on less than $5 per day still. It's one of the greatest supplies of available cheap labor on the planet, and it's not disappearing any time soon.

Now that China has built up immense wealth domestically (along with the productivity, economic capability and infrastructure linked to that step-up), which is very tightly contained within its borders by law, the Communist Party's position is cemented. They have unlimited reach within their borders, they can use any of their industrial might for anything they want at any time, and they can seize any assets they want to at any time. That wealth isn't going away, and their ability to use/abuse it at will is also not going away. Their eventual population decline will do nothing more than than raise the median standard of living.

Re: Joining Apple, Amazon’s China Cloud Service Bows to Censors

#37
post #26

What are they supposed to do? Either they comply or they leave the Chinese market. It's that simple. I hope people don't fault these companies for playing ball with a communist government.

Perhaps a naïve question but I mean it honestly: What relevance does communism have here? Is "communist" just being used as a synonym for corrupt or is there another meaning? I'm not American so I suspect I don't associate communism with the same things you do.

The Chinese government calls itself a communist government. I think the above comment is using communist as shorthand for 'authoritarianism clothed in communism,' which is normally the way things have turned out (USSR, China, Vietnam).

Re: Joining Apple, Amazon’s China Cloud Service Bows to Censors

#38
post #32
post #3

fyi AWS China is different from aws worldwide. It has its own portal https://www.amazonaws.cn , different set of services, policies, etc. Many cool fancy new features on aws worldwide is not available on aws china. Some of the differences even breaks third party libraries. e.g. some version of boto.

Does it belong to Amazon.com or does it not?

Aws has the tech stack, the datacenter is joint venture.

Re: Joining Apple, Amazon’s China Cloud Service Bows to Censors

#40
post #33

I'm glad everyone is so anti-censorship in this thread! Should tech companies also ignore censorship at the hands of European governments or Canada via "right to be forgotten" legislation? I seem to recall people on this site saying that it would be wrong for tech companies to resist the government in those cases. At least China isn't attempting to force censorship in other countries, unlike the Canadian government.

Google is fighting the Canadian court right now.

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/07/google-sues-in-u...

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