> I used those words myself in 2010 as Head of Public Policy for Asia Pacific, when I executed the company’s landmark decision to stop censoring Search results in China, putting human rights ahead of the bottom line.
This guy VPs. He's making it sound as if they cured cancer. What google did is agree to the law in China, and then started to break it. Those are horrible laws, but those were rules of the game from day 1.
Google did that _purely_ for PR - they could've just shutdown their service, instead of starting to break the local laws, they suddenly disagreed with.
What Google did which such an horrible execution, is made Chinese government even more paranoid and destroyed any trust in USA tech companies.
Google made a half-hearted show of flouting preexisting Chinese authoritarianism only to backtrack shortly thereafter when the cameras were off and the press/government had moved on.
An interesting point of comparison is Facebook of all things. For all of their faults, Facebook could not come to an agreement with the CCP respecting expression and human rights, and so chose to not do business in China. Yet in mainstream sources, the vitriol directed at Facebook is quite a bit more intense than that directed at Google. (And a lot of the hate directed at Facebook is frankly laughable compared to what Google has done.)
I don't even use Facebook (although I'd say I'm paranoid about both companies), but at least Zuckerberg &co. have some skin in the game when standing for their values.
(Almost as much skin in the game as those WhatsApp folks who sacrificed over a gigabuck over their disillusionment at what Facebook were doing to their creation.)
Other thought: the author is either extremely cynical/manipulative for writing a seemingly earnest polemic against Google in order to garner sympathy from the public, or he's genuinely a true believer who is a bit naive and would get steamrolled upon entering the US Senate.
Yes, Zuckerberg and his team have effectively withdrawn from China. They spent years trying to come to an agreement with the Chinese government, but could never find consensus. They opened up a dev shop in China, only to have the mandatory government license revoked some time later. Facebook has also instituted internal policies forbidding hosting data centers in countries with records of human rights abuses, although admittedly I haven't been able to verify whether they stick to that. It's not farfetched to see that Facebook missed out on tens to hundreds of billions in potential revenue, hence skin in the game.
Per Reuters[0]:
> Zuckerberg effectively closed the door to China in March [2019], when he announced his plan to pivot Facebook toward more private forms of communication and pledged not to build data centers in countries with “a track record of violating human rights like privacy or freedom of expression.”
I don't really understand US tech companies that trust China. Especially after the CPC's operatives were caught fishing in Gmail accounts for political dissidents.
This guy VPs. He's making it sound as if they cured cancer. What google did is agree to the law in China, and then started to break it. Those are horrible laws, but those were rules of the game from day 1.
Google did that _purely_ for PR - they could've just shutdown their service, instead of starting to break the local laws, they suddenly disagreed with.
What Google did which such an horrible execution, is made Chinese government even more paranoid and destroyed any trust in USA tech companies.