Google's censored Chinese search engine: a catalogue of ethical violations?

China does what it thinks is best for itself. The compromise is crippling of free speech. I don't like that.

Europe does what it thinks is best for itself. The compromise is crippling of innovation. I don't like that.

Are they doing the right thing? I don't think so. Is it legitimate for them to do so? Probably.

Personally, I believe the best solution is to break the rule. Ignore all regulations (hate speech, GDPR, copyrights, patents, net neutrality, China's firewall) and make it easy for people to do the same thing. They won't be able to enforce their unreasonable regulations, and they'll have to repeal them. That's what I intend to do.

> without Google or foreign books, Chinese internet users and readers will have less access to information.

If Google is using the same censorship filters as other search engines operating in China, is censored Google actually providing new or different information?

A common refrain that you will likely soon hear from Google executives and board members is that it's better to have access to a censored Google than no Google at all.

The problem is that when Google took a stance against censorship, users behind the Great Firewall or other censorship regimes knew that if they managed to reach www.google.com through VPN or other means they were getting uncensored results. Now, no one will ever know whether they are seeing the 'real' Google or not.

Google is one of the most advanced companies at geoblocking their services. You can't just hop on a VPN and access US-only Google services from, say, a French account. Google knows where you live, where you work, where you bank, who you're dating. This raises the spectre of Chinese censorship policies being applied even to queries coming from outside of the Great Firewall from accounts that have been deemed 'Chinese'.

If you think 'they would never do that', just look at how quickly US business folded in the dispute with Beijing over acknowledging Taiwan as a country. Once you have business interests in China that can be held hostage, you're all in the way.

When an addict tells you that you shouldn't use heroin it doesn't make them narcology expert. WRT "currently", does Guantanamo count?

> At the risk of sounding nationalistic, I think companies in the United States and other democratic countries should reconsider any and all business relationships with authoritarian regimes like those in China and Russia.

It just sounds stupid. Looking at the situation rationally it is the US that has in just the last 20 years (a) attacked several countries and murdered hundreds of thousands of innocent people and (b) revealed it is running the most extensive surveillance network in the history of the planet that legally and illegally attempts to surveil everybody including even allied political leaders and (c) regularly threatens to nuke and completely destroy other countries.

And somehow, despite all of this, we are supposed to think China is the authoritarian regime?

I know it's hard to imagine because Americans are completely lost in their bubble but the rest of the world understands well that it is the US, not Russia and certainly not China, that is the greatest threat to the world's peace and prosperity [1]. There's a difference between a country that is focused on exports and a country that bombs weddings and targets its own citizens for assassination on foreign soil.

Google returning to China is a good thing if only because it means the power of the US' murderous regime has over the multinational.

Realistically, it is not clear that China's censorship demands are unique outside of Asia or even Europe. China will ask Google to do the same monitoring and blacklisting that the corporation already does for Thailand, Malaysia and even Germany. None of this is new or even particularly unreasonable to the millions and billions of other people on the planet who don't live in the US. Believe it or not these people actually have their own ideas about how they want the internet to work.

[1] https://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2017/08/07/polls-us-g...