I'd somewhat hesitate to give out credit like that. It's more of that China kicked out Google, thus freeing Google to "stand up" to the CCP. I would love to see more of an example where a company had a lot on the line and still oppose the CCP
Also in quasi defense of Google (note that I work there), it almost do no business in China. So it doesn't bend over to The CCP.
Moving forward, my biggest purchasing decision as a consumer is going to be based on how much ties a company has to The CCP. I feel like my freedom is under direct threat from The CCP more than anything else, and I'll treat it accordingly when making purchasing decisions moving forward.
I think it's important to clear up why Google left China. Google was complying with Chinese rules. They left China because of a state-sponsored attack on Google[1]. Trying to play the high road with CCP, while leaving this out, is whitewashing American tech history in the state.
Given that the Chinese state elected to hack an American firm that was operating in it's borders, you could make any sort of excuse to prevent Chinese firms from owning American infrastructure for any sort of national security reasons. TikTok doesn't have to break any rules. If I see my roommate get mauled by a tiger, that doesn't mean I have to sit around and wait to get mauled before I take an action.
I dunno, if Google was sold to a Chinese company (so, essentially controlled by the CCP), would that in your mind be grounds to avoid using their services, or just another case of "China bad"?
I'm guessing you're perhaps conflating criticism of China/CCP with recent idiotic attacks on random asian people in the US?
They spun backing out of China as something they did in the interest of free speech, but it was more a response to them getting hacked by the CCP (it's still not clear what was stolen, but something big happened).
Well said. I always thought it was odd that people cheered Google when they pulled out of China even though they only did that because the Chinese government was hacking them (most notably not becase the Chinese government doesn't care about freedom of speech).
Depends. When they were struggling with the CCP, eventually getting all their services blocked in Mainland China, I don't think so. There are more examples of situations were Google really does take the other side of the table. It's not helpful to reducing it to these extremes.
I'm guessing you're just a year too young to remember Google having to pull out of China (and various similar US website forced out of China disasters about the same time) that the CCP pulled to give their home growns the big edge.
Claiming the domestic market is better because the CCP basically forced all the competition out by quite publicly asking them all to spy on the chinese citizens, politically unfeasible at the time for the US companies, is not that they 'are not competitive enough'.
It's Chinese protectionism and desire for central control.
I honestly feel like you're trying to rewrite what is very well documented history and very recent history at that. It was widely discussed here at the time.
Didn't Google refuse to work with US gov, but had no problem helping Chinese colleges and institutions which are directly controlled by or tied heavily to the CCP?
Google is like the CCP in the respect of consistency. They say they'll something, but history shows that they're erratic and unreliable and change their mind on a whim. Saying one thing and doing another. It's the reason why so many companies are pulling out of China, and it's the same reason why Google is floundering.
My recollection was that Google was outgunned by Baidu and similar Chinese tools, who were being actively supported by the CCP, while Google was half-tolerate. At the same time, it was losing security, IP, and reputation. There was a nice PR play around it, but I don't think "Google could have made a ton more money by helping China to build the tools of repression." It's better to build those in-house.
They kind of actually already did, like all the chinese companies. Because CCP banned google from chinese market years ago. Banning all CCP related corporations should have been implemented as a part of opening to china. or at least as an answer to CCP's censorship protectionism, etc.
Indeed; I've long suspected that one of the things prompting Google's action and fury is that the PRC government suborned some of their in country staff (not very difficult given the PRC's absolute ruthlessness).
I wrote this earlier, but the thread has become massive and hard to navigate so I figured I would respond to you here.
Google's history isn't so clean either.
They spun backing out of China as something they did in the interest of free speech, but it was more a response to them getting hacked by the CCP (it's still not clear what was stolen, but something big happened).
It's unclear what caused that to get shut down, but its leak and subsequent public pressure was probably a factor.
That said, I still think people within these companies should try to do the right thing (specifically that includes developers like us that make up these companies).
True. Also worth remembering, however, is that you can't definitively say that their replacement is doing more/worse than Google would have done - after all, if Google weren't willing to walk away, that could ultimately mean complying with the Chinese government just as much as any other company - we just didn't see it get that bad because they did pull out before then.
I don't have any other than there were 20 other companies who were not named at the time, Google was hacked by chinese military, now Yahoo claims china.
Deduction on my part, but no further evidence than that.
Baidu would certainly like to think so, and has said as much on occasion, but do the facts really support the claim that Google left China primarily due to competition rather than ethical or security concerns?
Google hasn't pulled out of other markets where it faces strong local competitors, such as Yandex in Russia, and it remains popular in Chinese-speaking markets outside of mainland China such as Hong Kong and Taiwan. That the developers of the Google Pinyin input tool were found to have copied data (something other companies in and out of China have also been guilty of from time to time) is hardly evidence that Google in general was not competitive.
Ironically, the fact that under Pichai a return to China was seriously contemplated would suggest that financial reasons alone can't explain the original decision to leave.
Similarly, YouTube wasn't forced to pull out of other markets where it faced competition. Also, YouTube was frequently blocked by Chinese authorities even before Google decided to pull out: https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052748703465204575207...
Competition may explain in part why Google hadn't conquered the Chinese market before it left, but conflict with the Chinese government, in the form of official censorship as well as illicit hacking, would seem to be the main reason why Google pulled out of China but not elsewhere.
Unless of course learning to comply with such demands and intrusions is included under "understanding the Chinese market".
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