The idea that a foreign corporation has a duty to break Chinese law with regards to web filtering is very problematic, if that's what you mean by "give concessions to the government". How far should such a corporation go with breaking the law, is tax evasion against the Chinese state morally acceptable, since those taxes might be used for oppression?

We should recognize here a very thin line between respecting the Chinese law and actively collaborating to subvert human rights - because the law is defined by an authoritarian regime with a long history of human right abuses.

That being said, surely you cannot change Chinese law from outside China, and if respecting it's current iteration is not in itself an unacceptable violation of human rights, it stands to reason that expanding in China at least forces the government to stick to it's own laws under the threat of a public exit and protest if unlawful pressures are made. It puts ethical companies in a position where they can nudge the Chinese towards ethical behavior - or at least very publicly denounce unethical demands.

You can't change Chinese law from inside China either. The only winning move is not to play.

Are there any legal restrictions on what the Chinese government can ask websites to censor? I am not aware of any, so I don't see where there would be an opportunity to protest.

I believe it's already established that operating in China means responding to all censorship requests. Nonetheless, there are still many things an ethical company could refuse: access to the private searches and information of an individual without a due legal process, collecting sensitive information altogether knowing that it's fair game for the state, knowingly alter or influence results to promote official narratives and propaganda, knowingly use or profit from the proceeds of labor camps, underage or other forms of work exploitation; and many, many more, which are surely not positively codified in any Chinese law, yet are widespread.

I don't think it's fair to try and nitpick people's ethical decisions like this.

Imagine yes, this person would work for Amazon even though they're in China too. Does that make them not working for Google because they're in China a bad choice? I don't think so.

Are we really prepared to tear everyone down who isn't absolute in their morality?

A moral inconsistency is not a nitpick when it's the entire industry.

Their logic makes Google a better employer than Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, Facebook and any other tech company currently operating in China. Saying they spurned Google because the company was considering going to China is disengenious, since the majority of the substitute employers are already in China.

> Saying they spurned Google...the majority of the substitute employers are already in China.

There is life outside of the FAANG/GAFAM bubble. If you refuse to work at Google, it doesn't mean that you're then obligated to work at Amazon or Microsoft, etc.

Of course there is, but when considering substitute employers, in the economic sense, working in a small-town software shop isn't quite the same as working at a multinational tech company.

If we're looking at it in that lens, then GP's problem isn't with Google, but with large tech companies in general because that's the industry standard.

> Of course there is, but when considering substitute employers, in the economic sense, working in a small-town software shop isn't quite the same as working at a multinational tech company.

The life outside of the FAANG/GAFAM bubble isn't just "small-town software shop[s]." There's a lot more diversity than that, and to conceive of the industry in that way is too parochial.

How many of those companies can be considered substitute employers to Google? That offer the same level of compensation?

That is what an economic substitute is. SMB tech companies typically don't compare.

You're saying his moral position is invalid because he doesn't apply it consistently, and that is not true, and also possibly harmful.

I said the moral position is disingenuous because it is both inconsistent and opposite to what he is describing, when considering all things related.

But each "related" decision is different, and there is no accurate generalization, by the very nature of what a generalization is.

There's a big difference between operating a business in China in general, and operating a business that necessarily involves implementing their surveillance infrastructure.

And Bing doesn't, while Dragonfly does?

I honestly have no idea. Last I heard, Bing is blocked in China, which I assume means that there are things that come in its search result that Chinese government doesn't like.

But Dragonfly [ostensibly] went well beyond just censoring results, in that it implemented specific tools like linking search requests with phone numbers identifying people who made those requests. That's straight-up aiding and abetting oppressing people - political opposition, for example, or even unorganized dissenters. I can't believe we are even seriously talking about whether this is okay or not.

bing.com redirects to a Chinese version of Bing, which prioritises Chinese sites.

I have no basis for saying this beyond not knowing how they could do this otherwise, but I would assume that they must censor results to exist there. I don't know if they go further, such as you describe Dragonfly plans to do.