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

That’s the same way that clothing brands deal with the problem of having their products made in sweat shops. Brand X makes their clothes in sweat shops, there’s an exposé, brand X does an investigation, finds that contractor Y hired subcontractor Z without the right controls in place, and then fires subcontractor Z. But subcontractor Z was just doing business with the actual sweatshop W, and after subcontractor Z is fired, contractor Y hires a new subcontractor Z', which then later rehires W because they’re the cheapest (after the media attention cools down).

Round and round it goes. Because there’s such a large chain, from brand X to contractor Y to subcontractor Z and finally sweat shop W, brand X has very weak and indirect control over the conditions in sweat shop W. This is by design, and it’s encouraged by the way our legal system works. Each link is an isolated domain with limited liability, than can be destroyed and replaced separately from the rest. On top of that, jurisdictional issues prevent the arm of the law from effectively addressing sweat shop W from the country where brand X exists, especially since contractors Y and Z might also be in completely separate countries. The economic pressure to be the cheapest encourages people to take ethical and legal shortcuts, to keep plausible deniability you make the supply chain long enough, and then whenever it blows up the blast radius is only as large as a single, replaceable link in the chain.

And so we get back to the idea that you can simply satisfy yourself by not personally doing business with China or Russia. The entire system is set up to pander to people who want to do things “ethically” by hiding all of the unethical behavior far away at the other end of the supply chain.

You can pat yourself on the back for not buying Kathy Lee Gifford or Nike, but you turn around and buy clothing at prices so low they can only be reliably sourced from workshops with the same terrible conditions.

I’m not arguing that the alternative is to turn a blind eye, but I don’t think outrage at individual companies that do business with the wrong countries is a meaningful choice that we can make. I’m not talking about companies like Nestlé, yes, let’s be plenty pissed off at Nestlé. But if we’re going to change this, the reach of the law should be longer. If brand X were liable for conditions in sweatshop W, financially, then that kind of hazard would be priced into all of the contracts all the way down the chain.

This is called “extraterritorial jurisdiction” and it has precedent, like Australia’s Crimes (Child Sex Tourism) Amendment Act 1994.

I think there certainly should be a distinction between what is being traded. Medicine & building materials is one thing, weapons & censorship tools is another.

Google's problem here is that they are going to have a much more difficult time explaining why x,y, and z are not censored on the search engines of countries that supposedly are democratic. If they are removing nuanced items for China's regime they are going to find themselves being required, legally, to remove all kinds of things in just about everywhere. That will be a net negative to the free world.

My suspicion is that Google expects Chinese compliant censorship is much more feasible now, without an army of workers, due to machine learning. That is very concerning and if true, I think it presents a case that those involved should resign or be removed immediately.

You don't need to China to find Google's ethical violations - US-made censorship is great again.

When an addict tells you that you shouldn't use heroin because it will ruin your life, the fact that they used heroin and it ruined their life doesn't make them a liar, it make them experienced.

And the sole legitimate purpose in calling out hypocrisy is to get the other party to follow their own advice. But that means for Nazism and McCarthyism to be relevant you have to identify some specific present day instance of them that currently needs to be eliminated. At which point we would need to oppose that and what China is doing.