Capitalism doesn’t “disfavor evil” per se (it doesn’t care), the lack of trust increases transaction cost. Increased verification and higher pricing of risk tend to follow from transactions between parties who lack trust in each-other.
As for the timeline, the Soviet Union showed us a nice 70 year run… East Germany’s run was much shorter. China clunked along from the 50’s to the 90’s and then has had to change quite a bit, but remains pretty evil (though much more bureaucratically so than the prior era).
The timeline, like many pricing schemes is about perception of the market players. There is no fixed timeline.
The timliene of trust and ethical players increasing efficiency, however, is rather fast (like transaction #2 between player A and player B).
I am skeptical as to how much Google’s compliance with China in China will affect trust domestically. If Google’s value, convenience, etc. are competitive, then I don’t think American companies are going to to avoid Google services out of solidarity with the Chinese people.
A lot of Google’s global competition comes from Chinese companies, so evil or not, it seems inevitable that they would have to find a way to enter the Chinese market. I’m sure there’s immense pressure from shareholders to do so, and isn’t that capitalism at work?
Sure… as I said, they are free to choose their business model and time horizon as are their shareholders.
The question is will “the market” (the aggregate of all players) consider the longer-term time-horizon?
Should they? I think so and hope people will do a better job considering the implications of the surveillance state than they clearly have thus far, but I don’t control the market - its not my place to impose my will on it.
So, I vote with my dollars and speak out in hopes that others might do so as well. China has already reached a pretty scary position in terms of their social credit score and effective control over information. The timeline of the break-down of that system is unknown (N Korea has demonstrated a remarkable run on that front, but that was before their people had any means of going around the government (and memory/reason to do so).
China is starting from behind on this front. The Chinese people have a memory and personal experience of going around the censorship. I think this will speed their rejection of but within 1-1000 years per history…
Haven’t been following that closely so take what I’ve heard with a huge lump of salt, but from what I understand it was meant to be a requirement that individual Chinese users be logged in in order to use any of the services, and only specific services were to be provided - most would still be firewalled off. Specific tools were meant to provide prism like UI capabilities (e.g. type in a phone number get search+location history) for the Chinese government to use, that would allow combining data coming from various data sources at a very low level (but mostly search and Gmail) and it would bypass most of audit controls that are put in place in order to track access to an individuals data, ie. This would be a whitelisted ACL approved albeit very strange mode of access.
The overwhelming majority of employees in the company (everyone I know who has time to voice an opinion on this) consider this type of thing super creepy and flying in the face of moral and privacy standards they would normally try to uphold.
Nobody I know agrees with the arguments like “various countries laws exist for a reason therefore Google should not be deciding which ones to follow” or “if Google doesn’t do it, someone else might and it’ll be worse”. Most people I know working there have a general mistrust towards any government and world be happy to express it in a genuine concerned and caring and pragmatic “I trust the government as much as I can throw it” way, from what I can tell average user of this forum would be naive in comparison.
In contrast to dragonfly, usually, authorization passing systems like macaroons are heavily in use in pretty much everywhere. (Think oauth chains for servers). Typically a service in the middle of the stack, that might be passing user data e.g. between a storage system and a frontend server handling user requests, would only be allowed to access the data upon user request. There’s a requirement that each such access is logged for auditing, access requests to those audit logs are also audit logged.
In general there’s plenty of other, IMHO way less creepy and more useful work that engineers can spend their time on.
The censorship occurring on this forum where, political discussion is prohibited but it is ok to bash China while America uses the same platform Globally to censor content and distribute propaganda is offensive.
I’ve just about given up on this forum and sadly the youtube channel as the result of the rehashing of american propaganda thinly disguised as news. I miss the great technical content that made this a fantastic resource. I will just vote with my feet and no one will care. such is life. so long and thanks for all the fish.
Late to this game, but a few thoughts from reading the thread:
Didn’t Google drop the “don’t be evil” motto (even as unofficial) years ago? I thought they had anyway.
I recall when they pulled out in 2010 having a classmate from China (only here to study) we asked about what she thought on the matter or how other people there may feel about Google pulling out. Her response was she didn’t think it would be a big deal, as everyone was using Baidu anyway. It brought to light the fact that, while in much of the developed world Google is by far the dominant engine, that was not the case in China, it was by far a minority service.
That also lead me to believe that part of the reason they pulled out at the time wasn’t necessarily just because they were morally opposed to censorship, but because they didn’t actually have that much to loose. 10% (not a real figure) share of China may still have been considerable, but China is also a large country that hasn’t been on the top of connectivity, so I don’t know how much it cost them to efficiently operate in China vs how much they were getting from it with their small share. On top of that, it gave them good PR in all the areas they did have a strong share already and which had a lot of denser/well connected users. On top of that, dealing with the Chinese government may just have been an extra expense at the time.
Pulling out may have just been a better business plan, rather than an ethical stance. (And yes, maybe employees were pissed about China. It’s costly to deal with angry employees / employee turnover too). Maybe that wasn’t the entire reason, but I’m sure it factored in.
i don’t know how much Google can expect to gain going in now if the playing field is as ‘even’ as before. Again, they had a small share before, and now they would have to start over in building a market, while Baidu has built up it’s market for 8 more years.
Related to the above, Google is probably not entering the same playing field. If they are working with China to make this software, China is probably paying them big for it, and/or promising them something that will result in a big payout for them (some advantage to build a market again?). China likely has a much better internet using market at this point, so that probably helps the bottom line if nothing else, so maybe even a minority share looks really good. Remember though, they aren’t going to get 1/7th of the world population using Google most likely, they’ll just be opened up to make an attempt at all of them (unless China is cooking up some major advantage for Google, but why they would do that over Baidu, I don’t know).
While I don’t like it, I’m not sure the “if we don’t do it, someone else will” is the necessary justification. How do we expect this to hurt the people vs what they have now? It really may just be a justification of “they don’t have access to this information as it is/they are already being restricted, if we censor our services, they are no worse off, we just get more users / a foot in the door of the market. Hell, we get more influence this way to maybe improve things in the future”.
Not saying that’s a good justification, just saying that might be the real rationale some are using.
Or because the forum had a long history of extremely counterproductive threads to the point of being a detriment to the user experience? The rule was in place before Level 1.
We have no control over what you can and cannot say, you are free to talk about whatever you want. Just not everything you can talk about here. But we can’t stop you talking about something somewhere else (you can talk any politics on our own discord for example). So congratulations, you’ve not been sensored by us.