this post was submitted on 06 Oct 2023
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I think this has always been Apple's weakest aspect. They position themselves as a thought leader and ethical company, but when push comes to shove, will do whatever it takes to get market access.
Say what you want about Google - at least they put their money where their mouth is on China.
Only after they found out it would be unprofitable.
Google has no high ground here, project dragonfly was worked on for a long while until it wasn’t going to be a cash cow.
They pulled out of China in 2010. They were considering a return internally and scrapped it. Buy they didn't leave because they "found out it would be unprofitable."
Google's no saint, I get it, but everyone and their mother knew in 2010 that China is a hundred-billion dollar market opportunity and businesses were (and still are) pumping tens of billions of dollars into unlocking that. Google was there very early for tech, and while their lunch was still being eaten by Baidu in 2010 due to government pumping up the local competitor, there was no business sense in leaving. That's why I think they really did leave exactly why they said - a refusal to censor search results. They would still be there if it was just a business decision.
2019, and only after it was exposed and they got bad press in the USA.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragonfly_(search_engine)
Google abandoned the search market in China in 2010. They moved some portion to Hong Kong but stopped censoring search results. They provided narrow services like Translate but as far as I know never reversed their position against that censorship and reentered China.
Project Dragonfly was an internal project that was dropped ("prototype" is the ninth word in the Wikipedia article you linked). Google has nibbled around the edges of reentering China since 2010 but hasn't actually done so.
Google left China because they couldn’t comply with the government’s expectations.
When they started building that prototype, they knew EXACTLY what the censorship requirements were and they didn’t give the slightest fuck. Why? Because money.
Why build the prototype if they were taking a moral stand?
I'm so confused by your logic. They didn't release it. Sure, every company develops things, I'm sure because some VP thought they'd make money and get promoted. But you're saying an internal prototype which has no business impact (because it was never released) outweighs them leaving the market and remaining out for 13 years which has a substantial business impact (because they forewent billions in opportunities) while giving no weight to the fact that their ultimate choice was to not release that prototype (again, foregoing billions in opportunities).
It's a chain of reasoning that is only possible if you've tautologically assumed they're operating in bad faith, so that can't be probative of if they're operating in bad faith.
I mean, I'm not even saying Google is good, I'm comparing them to Apple who is now agreeing to actively refuse to post apps that are not registered with the government. If you're debating me to argue they're equivalent, yikes.
Google also removes apps from the play store.
Google developed it with the intention of releasing it, and willingly cooperating with the Chinese regime. While they didn’t end up going through with it, it wasn’t until the bad press in the USA pushed them to avoid releasing it. I think that’s fairly substantial proof that Google is more than willing to go along with the regime unless it directly hurts them.
They didn’t forgo that much profit by leaving China because they were forced to leave China. Their current offerings in2010 were being pressed by Chinese authorities to do things and monitor/filter in ways that Google wasn’t capable of doing at the time. AI they spun it as “do no evil” when the reality is that they were being walked out by the Chinese anyways.
Enter project dragonfly, aka “we still want that money and we don’t actually have a moral stand on this”
We disagree, because I still think the fact that they did make the right choice in the end controls vis a vis an imputed moral choice on Project Dragonfly, and think Google did have the ability to make keyword-filtering changes in 2010. But thank you for engaging in a civil debate about it.
I appreciate you being civil aswell!
Yep I’m in the “Google is evil” club 😝
I would like to add that this was considerably recent, they pulled out of China deliberately when they were asked to censor search. Idk what changed but there have been too many changes there to pinpoint what's the actual reason.
My point is that they were fine censoring search for a long time so it seems unlikely that the censorship was the issue.