Just think of it, to
> replace a wild maddog with an ordinary megacorp, which at least has a well-defined bottomline and more or less under the public supervision of the citizens
requires petitioning Google, not Baidu or the CCP... because that is probably easier than forming a consumer group that petitions the government to enact laws against the predatory ads Baidu has, and which they hope Google will not have (it's not like Google didn't attempt some shady shit with making sponsored results look nearly like normal results before). That's just "out of the question"
And predictably so. Because to organize like that, for something the people wanted for themselves, without being told they should want it? Yeah, right. After decades of killing dissidents en masse, the remainder of what people still are able to even consider has shrunken considerably.
Speaking of predatory and invasive:
http://www.hoteliermiddleeast.com/33151-marriott-employee-fi...
The CCP is already treating other people in free countries like they're treating their "own" people. Yes, and Western companies play along, and I don't blame China for that at all -- but it also shows how the CCP is ticking, for those that need examples.
Totalitarianism is not just censorship and oppression. That's like saying war is hitting people and loading things on trucks. The "total" in its name means something, after all, it's not a self-given label.
> We don't know a perfected totalitarian power structure, because it would require the control of the whole planet.
-- Hannah Arendt
China never opened up to the West in any meaningful way. I mean, if a murderer invites you to dinner, with the implicit understanding that you're not to talk about the murders -- that's using someone as fig leaf, that's rubbing it in, not opening up. Meanwhile, the guy asks questions, and makes sure to tell everybody you were over to dinner. China is opening the West up to it.
I'm not saying the West is just great and perfect, with the wars of aggression and whatnot. But I'm vocal about that as well, and just because your arm is burning, why would you set your leg on fire, too?
If anything, the opposite would make sense. Because our governments are so corrupt, because we have this push for mass surveillance and militarization, we cannot afford to get in bed even more deeply with a totalitarian regime.
> Retain the power of speech no matter what other power you may lose. If you can take this course, and in so far as you take it, you will bless this country. In so far as you depart from this course, you become dampers, mutes, and hooded executioners.
-- John J. Chapman
I want to be able to at least say I might have been deserving to live in a better world, even if I couldn't do enough to make this one that world. I want to remain in the company of thinkers and humans. Nothing more, nothing less. If humanity turns the world into an eternal torture chamber, I do not want to be guilty of having belittled or supported that. And if people think that's hyperbole, I certainly don't want to be guilty of it just so people wouldn't roll their eyes at me. I'm responsible for what I see and know, not for what others see and know. I compare what I have against the loss I see, not the loss others don't see because they were raised without it in the first place.
Even the idea of weighing normalization of and cooperation with totalitarianism against "online frauds" is, well, we live in completely different worlds.
> Even if I take an utilitarianist approach
The "even" implies that even then, it would come up the same, but your "formula" seems to show the opposite, that Google's contribution is "likely small", while fraud is "a lot". Like, I guess that is counted in units, eg. one murder vs. one fake viagra pill, so of course 5 murders are not easy to weigh against 50000 people defrauded with fake viagra pills... am I getting this correctly?
Since "surely causes long-term damage" also struck me as rather cold, while kinda giving lip service to not being cold, it occured to me that reading it as "cold", the "even" makes sense. Reading it as a cold description of something that is NOT meant to be belittled, the "even" does not.
But even this argument is only possible on the backdrop of Chinese citizens fixing their own search engines, even though they ALL seem to hate it and should have a lot of power, being "out of the question".