Having mentioned that, I think I have to part ways with him when he implies that the correct way to "fix" this is to have the government come in and make these sorts of business decisions for the company. I don't believe in the government obliging businesses to do things. Especially when it looks like this whole thing is Google specific. That's unfair to Google.
What about all the other American companies doing business in China? Do they get to keep doing business because they are politically popular companies but Google is not? Or would this be a government mandate of a broad based American pull out?
Or just forcing Google to let its employees have a say in how it's run? (But again, you gonna force every company? Or just Google?)
Etc etc etc.
Once government gets involved and starts playing favorites, everything gets messed up.
His long-term goals seem to be industry-wide ("I would hope that The Committee would help protect the environment needed for future whistleblowers by taking steps to guarantee ethical transparency and oversight across Silicon Valley").
I think you're reading into this something you fear, but that is not even on the table.
The government - including the US government - is obliging all companies operating on its territory to do certain things. That's one of the roles of government.
Believing in gravity doesn't mean that you then need to gain as much weight as possible. In fact, taking into account science like that, you might want to lose a certain amount of weight for your health.
"The government obliging businesses to do things," is necessary, like carbohydrates are necessary. That said, you don't want too much of something.
E.g. make laws that apply to all companies as opposed to picking on one company or another.
So I think you're actually agreeing since gravity applies to all things vs arbitrarily deciding which things to pull down.
That metaphor holds if he doesn't believe that the US government has ever obliged a business to do anything; it's objectively true that the USG exists and asserts power over many businesses. But "believe in" there is pretty obviously a claim about desirability, and I think a lot of people don't believe gravity has intrinsic moral value.
Actually, I like this metaphor. Gravity isn't intrinsically moral, but from a human perspective there are certainly right and wrong values. Deimos, where you can accidentally jump into orbit, has too little. Jupiter, where hydrogen is crushed into a metal, has too much. So now we're back to quibbling over the desirable amount of an amoral force, and comparisons to physics haven't changed the situation.
Yea, but I'm a big fan of regulated food, clean water and pollution standards. Upholding your obligations is a requirement to receiving the protection of the government as you conduct your business. It's a two-way street.
> Especially when it looks like this whole thing is Google specific.
The better question is whether Google is acting as a monopoly in the regulated domain or not, if they are -- then this isn't a relevant factor.
> What about all the other American companies doing business in China?
We'll get to them eventually.. but why shouldn't we go after the biggest business first? Wouldn't that provide the greatest reduction in harm?
> Or would this be a government mandate of a broad based American pull out?
There are already plenty of laws which make transacting business in China more difficult for US based companies. It's not as if it's laissez faire except for Alphabet Inc.
> Once government gets involved and starts playing favorites
I don't disagree, but you haven't made a sufficient case that "favorites" are being played or that other factors aren't more prevalent.
> We'll get to them eventually.. but why shouldn't we go after the biggest business first? Wouldn't that provide the greatest reduction in harm?
There's actually a name for laws that target one individual while ignoring others guilty of the same behavior, and that's a "bill of attainder" [0]. They're banned by the US Constitution and also every state constitution, which might give you some idea that there are pretty good reasons "why not" (namely, that they're ripe for abuse, they violate someone's right to due process, and can be used by the legislature to take on judicial or executive functions, violating the separation of powers).
You're comparing food and water to how a company does business in another country. These two things couldn't be more different. Does the US government also manage food and water in China?
> The better question is whether Google is acting as a monopoly
That's an entirely different question. The letter seemed to target the china problem directly, which is more about censorship than monopoly. If anything, monopoly is just being used as an excuse here.
> but why shouldn't we go after the biggest business first?
Isn't Apple bigger by most metrics?
> you haven't made a sufficient case that "favorites" are being played
I think the point is, if favorites aren't being played now, this sort of move incentives companies to suck up even more to lawmakers. If Google gets screwed for doing business in China while thousands of other companies get away with it, what kind of incentive does that show?
Completely irrelevant. There are no US laws against private companies building censorship tools in the US, let alone in China.
You do realize that Google doesn't do search business in China, right?
OK.
Is it more or less messed up than that a private corporation can and is willing to perform surveillance on foreign citizens on behalf of those citizens' government that would be unacceptable anywhere else?
Do you want your companies to be extensions of US foreign policy?
edit: Not saying that because other companies do something similar that Google should get carte-blanche, just trying to see what the differentiation is.
1: https://qz.com/990662/microsoft-released-a-new-version-of-wi...
2: https://www.engadget.com/2018/07/18/apple-icloud-data-china-...
3: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-facebook-privacy-congress...
It actually happens a lot more places than just China. The only reason its getting headlines now is because its Google.
There are a TON of information security companies who deal with sketchy foreign governments to develop tools to spy on their own citizens.
- Israeli company NSO helping the UAE spy on pro-democracy activist Ahmed Mansoor
- BAE Systems actively shopping surveillance tools to countries like Algeria, Morocco, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE during the Arab Spring.
- Procera Networks who sold deep packet inspection tools to Turkey to spy on its citizens
- Hacking Team's surveillance software was sold to the Ethiopian government (among others) to spy on journalists and other activists in their country.
You also have Mitnick who threw his hat in the ring and said he has a team of hackers uncovering zero-day exploits that he hopes to sell to the highest bidder - even if the bidder is a repressive regime.
Should we break them up or just fine them into nonexistence?
Business use this sort of hand wavy excuse all the time “government shouldn’t be involved.” Truth is they don’t want the American people to have any say in the operation.
Sure, you could say we vote with out dollars but they keep as much info secret as humanly possible.
They need regulation for basic things like “users own their information” and “don’t corporate with foreign governments to censor or monitor citizens”.
How the US public bought this corporate lie so hard is beyond me, people are actively rooting for companies to get more and more power.
And, what if we extended this across the board to all corporations, not just Google?
I feel uneasy when thinking about the society China is trying to build overtly, and the society that Washington is building covertly. It’s sad that 15 years after the Patriot Act, we’ve just accepted domestic surveillance as a requisite function of governance.
But there's a whole sliding scale of space between the two, and the question of which tool to use when is the day-to-day meat of a livable and happy society.
I'm against all forms of surveillance, but it seems hypocritical to criticize Google for complying with immoral foreign laws when they also comply with immoral domestic laws.
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jun/06/us-tech-giants...
Edit: Ah, apparently conforming with Chinese laws doesn't just extend to surveillance, but aiding in the genocide of the Uyghur people. That's a lot worse.
The lack of trust is due to the image of politicians shaking hands and benefiting from corporate spend (Citizens United etc.). Significantly reduce that influence and work towards earning the trust of the people back. The whole "Drain the Swamp" con got a lot of votes.
On it's face, the situation is obviously ridiculous isn't it?
1. Politicians need large sums of money to win elections (problem #1).
2. Corporations and wealthy individuals are allowed to provide that money (problem #2).
3. We expect politicians to police their donors (obvious conflict).
When there's riches (and power... but that's unavoidable) involved you end up with more opportunists than idealists.
Like it or not, it's hard to argue with that theory.
Companies dont have our interests in mind any more than the government, but we can vote the government out.
Then remove money/favoritism from politics so that we get policies for the people, not some businesses.
Yes, removing money from political influence is hard, but the US has swung so extreme in the wrong direction that it puts the entire democracy at risk.
On this issue, nothing will be done (I hope) because it's irrelevant to US citizens. But it is a good thing to publicly call them to task for violating their own internal guidelines and mandated policies. It's not acceptable.
The article seems to have recently been modified to link to it.
[0] https://int.nyt.com/data/documenthelper/328-jack-poulson-dra...
You already see that kind of weasily justification here all the time[0]: "Companies are soulless machines that exist only to make money, they should do whatever they're legally allowed to do."
The only response to this kind of moral nihilism is legislation.
Should government oblige Boeing to make safe airplanes? Google and others not to violate user privacy? All businesses not to sell dangerous munitions to terrorist and enemy states?
> it looks like this whole thing is Google specific
Nothing has been done or even proposed yet; what is that based on?
In the U.S. at least, generally the government can't make laws for individual companies or businesses; Congress couldn't pass a law that bilbo0s can't sell laptops in China, for example. They would have to make a law about every business doing things in China. However, I don't know the specifics of that legal principle and how it is applied here.
> Once government gets involved and starts playing favorites, everything gets messed up.
Things already seem messed up. I don't see private enterprise as more reliable than the voters and their representatives, and the latter seems like a more fair way to resolve public affairs. I guess I have faith and confidence in democracy. It is flawed, of course, just like every other human institution from Google to religious institutions to everyone here on HN.
Not quite as disgusting as how we ended up with torture, including waterboarding, indefinite detainment, and a whole slew of fun activities in the early aughts that made great recruitment ammo. All under the sentiment of "Oh, well if they aren't Americans they don't have rights." Or "If they aren't on American soil they don't have rights".
There is a case to be made that the Bill of Rights is an extension of the "unalienable rights" mentioned in the deceleration of independence. That you can't take those away or give those to people. That the Bill of Rights simply enshrined and protected them, not provided them.
Maybe we should rename the Bill of Rights to "Bill of Perks for being in America" and retcon our founding principals. It's interesting seeing people who would probably consider themselves "libertarians" arguing against legal action protecting peoples liberties..
The idea of inalienable rights is theoretical at best, because a large fraction of the world is alienated from any right one cares to name. As an assertion that humans deserve these things, that they should be demanded without compromise or compensation? Sure. As an assertion that they are in any consequential sense distinguishable from alienable rights? I don't see how.
Virtually every country in the world operates under laws that contravene the US Bill of Rights in one manner or another. The speech laws of nations like Germany and Britain, whatever their merits, unambiguously violate the First Amendment. The Sixth Amendment is unsupported in virtually any nation without an adversarial justice system. The Seventh Amendment is unsupported in most nations, where jury trials are either not practiced or not guaranteed. Even without touching the Second Amendment, the vast majority of liberal democracies allied with America do not uphold the Bill of Rights.
As is, this is easy to sort out: the Bill of Rights restricts the actions of the US Government and no one else. Issues like waterboarding and indefinite detainment operate at the edge of this principle, but I'm content to observe that the Bill of Rights does not discuss citizenship or soil; it simply places restrictions on the action of the US Government towards 'persons'. Rendition and torture are fundamentally different from any question of Google's activity, and were clearly illegal. Similarly, the government is restricted from infringements, not just direct action; the use of proxies like contractors to violate rights is clearly illegal.
In the international case, though, I genuinely don't understand what you're proposing. Google did not violate the rights of persons, citizen or otherwise, US soil or otherwise, on behalf of the US government. (In fact, it's not even clear that it would have violated such rights by running Dragonfly in the United States on the orders of the US government. I desperately want Constitutional privacy guarantees, but the idea is still uncomfortably penumbral.)
So: are corporations obligated to uphold constitutional rights with regard to their own actions, independent of the state? Are they obligated to uphold those rights abroad? Does that exclusively apply to companies incorporated in the US, or those resident for tax purposes, or is a permanent establishment sufficient? If the answer isn't 'incorporated', what are they to do when multiple nations assert conflicting rights, as with Google's Canadian legal mess between 1A guarantees and the right to be forgotten? If it is 'incorporated', what happens when US-dominated companies begin incorporating under international flags of convenience?
I could go on at much greater length, but leave it there. My objection is not that US citizens are special or deserve better than other people, but that attempts to enforce Constitutional guarantees beyond the action of the US government have promptly become both legally ambiguous and frighteningly imperialistic. And so far, I haven't seen any proposal for avoiding that outcome.
Government can already block the sale of companies, and whether they can sell certain kinds of products to certain countries. I don't think Google should be given a "free ride" to make whatever decisions they want just because they are a popular tech company.
Want to be an American company? Obey the US Government's laws and decrees. If not, they can relocate to the UK (and obey UK laws and decrees) or to the Bahamas (and obey Bahamian law and decrees) and become a non-US based entity.
Getting the US government involved period is a bad idea. Government interference in business is how big government starts. You need more and more agencies to police business behavior, and that eventually leads to large, inefficient, and inept bureaucratic agencies that do more harm than good. Example: EPA, FDA, etc
Semi-related, how weird is this https://twitter.com/amlivemon/status/1002044167793594368
> As a condition of China joining the WTO in 2000, Visa and Mastercard would be allowed into China market. 18 years later, China has lost a WTO case on this subject and Visa/Mastercard are still not allowed into China. That's just for starters. Don't believe China on trade deals.
China and trade is a real quagmire.
The industry is moving to enact something that maintains the status quo [1].
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/26/technology/tech-industry-...
[1] https://hbr.org/2018/09/how-to-exercise-the-power-you-didnt-...
All while you "give grants to promote your principles, finance populace-educating groups, fund pro-privacy thinktanks/projects/foundations, etc." there will be other corporations and interest groups who spend time and money on "heavy-handed government internet intervention" that will ultimately affect you.
At the end of the day, what you can do or not revolves around politics and policy; not economic markets. This includes, in case this needs reminding, property rights that make market dynamics possible to begin with.
In truth, .gov >> .com, and by pretending it is otherwise - and acting like it is - you let yourself and your country (which I presume is the US) be manipulated by those who know better and put their $$$ towards whatever their goals are.
https://www.ted.com/talks/lawrence_lessig_we_the_people_and_...
Lamenting about the fate of small businesses is getting tiresome, especially when said businesses are one dime a dozen startups whose ultimate goal on their wonderful journey is to get sold and make the founders rich.
It's because it's a lie.
Advertisers have been doing it for years, using government funded research in military propaganda that made it's way into universities after WW2 as marketing and journalism programs.
This rhetoric is something like "Kill this particular witch!" without questioning whether the belief we hold on how the world works is rational.
EDIT: let me re-state:
Why is the public conversation around data mining limited to west coast tech?
Media be capitalizing on the public mistrust in the air after the election, and government is leaning in.
Why should any big brand or corporate master be enabled to collect and analyze my behavior in an effort to get me to buy more of their widgets without my explicit approval?
Oh enough. There's been concern since the beginning, it's just getting more press right this minute.
One step at a time.
Because tech companies have broad, detailed, individual-level visibility into our habits. Neither traditional advertisers nor the government have ever had data that detailed.
1) The misperception that everyone in Silicon Valley is wealthy beyond their wildest dreams while the rest of the country is struggling.
2) Trump was elected instead of Hillary
A very small minority have valid concerns over privacy and the reach of the tech giants, for everyone else, it's simple politics.
I'm not sure who the bigger villain is here: Google, or whoever wants to cut them down.
If you don't like Google's tracking practices: don't use Google products. If you're okay with them, then keep using Google products. Free minds; free people; associating with each other freely.
Washington should be weary of regulations like GDPR on principle. Plus I doubt GDPR would have passed if Google, Facebook, and Twitter were, say, French. GDPR was only passed because the companies they were "targeting" (and they were targeting a specific set of companies let's please be real) were foreign.
This is complete and utter nonsense and only shows that you know nothing about EU policy making. The EU regulates the shit out of EU-based businesses. That's very well-known and quite controversial. And by the way, GDPR affects a ton (!) of EU businesses, basically every company that has some kind of web page. Do you really think there are no internet businesses beyond Silicon Valley?
They know. There’s nothing they can do about it. Even as someone who wants to protect their own privacy it’s impossible without being in a cave or updating your habits every week. Use Linux and duck duck go and don’t use any social media and don’t have a phone and only buy 15 year old TVs and late model cars, don’t use credit cards.
Blaming internet users for not protecting their privacy indicates that one has no idea how anything works, or they make their money off of ads.
While I applaud his personal stance on refusing to work on a censored search engine, any solution that requires foregoing independent corporate decision making would be foolish. For those who have been tasked with building tools that support authoritarian regimes, grow a spine, make your voice heard, and quit if necessary. Don't give me any bullshit excuses for continuing, if you know it's wrong stop supporting it!
> any solution that requires foregoing independent corporate decision making would be foolish
Whether you think less regulation or more regulation is better, you can't in good faith advocate for no regulation. Corporations have demonstrated many times over the years that they are profit maximizing algorithms with no regard for human life.
> For those who have been tasked with building tools that support authoritarian regimes, grow a spine, make your voice heard, and quit if necessary.
Once again, this makes very little sense in the context of history. Individual people are largely powerless when standing up to large organizations. Corporations do not self regulate and individuals cannot stop them. They are effectively a form of "very slow rogue AI" and the only way we seem to be able to control them, at least for a little while, is with central governments.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuskegee_syphilis_experiment
There's this narrative that the major cause of improvement in conditions (civil rights, workers rights, child rights etc.) comes from government regulation. This is called legal prescriptivism. Another narrative is that things generally improve as the economy does, and are then codified into law. This is legal descriptivism.
Typically history moves forward with a mixture of both, but it should not be taken for granted that prescriptivism is always the only way progress happens, nor that prescriptive progress always positive.
I'll take your permissionless innovation and raise you 8 million tons of plastic garbage going into the oceans every year[1], a depleted Ozone layer, black lung, asbestos, and unbreathable air. (Not to mention global warming--egad!) The problem is that industry "permissionlessly innovates" and because profitable innovations flourish in the marketplace, the system blindly scales bad ideas to global proportions, and only after we've accumulated massive debt do we try restrict their actions with feeble legislation which is roundly shouted down by deniers funded by the profits of those industries and poo-pooed by corrupt legislators beholden to their financiers.
You see why there might be some systemic problems with this default setting?
We need to jettison this idea that companies get to do whatever they want "because it's for the economy!" and only later do we reign them in when they've inevitably wrecked something that we only recognize is important in hindsight.
[1] Who knows, maybe some might come back with "oh it's those dirty trash monkeys in India and Indonesia who can't be good and put their garbage in a hole like we do". To that: yeah, the problem is we didn't innovate and scale the economy hard enough to save the planet. Right. Meanwhile, who thought it up? Who sold them all those damn coke bottles and chip bags?
and your counters are all basically non American. As to "8 million tons of plastic garbage going into the oceans every year[1], a depleted Ozone layer, black lung, asbestos, and unbreathable air. " America does rather well at getting rid of those, China is the biggest offender.
It works in America because they do pass laws to reduce that stuff, China could try harder.
also known as common law. and most ex-UK colonies have it(USA/Canada/India/Australia/New Zealand/UK & more)
What have the "big" SV companies in common?
Exploiting customer data more than ever before with weak US lawmakers unwilling to challenge them or press for stronger user protections. Including adapting or enforcing rules more suitable for the internet age.
FB/Instagram/LinkedIn and other social media companies rely on inducing addictive behaviour in their users so as to sell more ads. That's it. All bullshit about connections and making the world a better place.. It's hollow. Gamification of users so as to sell more ads.
At-will contracts, the gig economy, force arbitration, the privacy free-for-all, union busting, zero-hour contracts, privatised law enforcement, privatised medical care and all the other innovations created by US corporations.
And your proposed solution is absurd, by the way, and this can be easily demonstrated by the fact that few awful organisations had trouble finding qualified personnel.
I've seen that theory, but my understanding is that striking a proper balance is what fosters innovation; anarchy yields corruption and spoils for the powerful; it does not reward the most productive and innovative. Also, my impression is that other things may be much more important for innovation, especially opportunity for education, for capital, and for access to the market (e.g., rules that prevent vested interests from blocking newcomers from the marketplace).
> any solution that requires foregoing independent corporate decision making would be foolish
Should we abolish all laws and regulations about safety, fraud, and fairness? Personally, I don't see corporations as having such a great track record that I trust them so implicitly.
Then don't act as if this is sufficient reasoning. Any one of these people or the entire department could quit, and you and I both know it would be re-staffed inside of a month.
> named for this scene from the children's movie.
Which should be a strong hint as to it's merit in the real-world. You shouldn't have to look very deeply into our society to see where the problems of this mentality lay; in fact, whole other works of fiction and non-fiction alike have been created just to highlight this precise fact.
A concept so simple that a child could understand it is fundamentally sound.
1. Campaigns cost a lot of money.
2. Private organizations fund political campaigns.
3. A legislator's constitutional job is to maintain an effective set of rules for a country/state/city whatever.
4. Is the democratic process effective in voting in the best legislators?
4.a. or is the democratic process the best at voting in the best fund raisers?
5. With the massive amounts of private capital, are the best innovators, engineers and builders succeeding or are the best fund raisers succeeding?
6. Is private capital largely responsible for the success of new companies (ventures) as well as aspiring legislators?
Well, not everything is so black and white as those points, but looking at one extreme perspective, does raise many concerns in my mind. The primary one being, "is democracy reaching it's breaking point?"
The only reason someone is not building a nuclear plant in your neighborhood or polluting rivers and poisoning your kids is regulations. The idea that this 'dampens innovation' is an extremely narrow view of 'innovation' without context of consequences.
Building surveillance infrastructure is unethical and pollutes the commons and democracy, every educated person knows this, yet hundreds of thousands of 6 figure earning engineers did it anyway. These are the same old problems of commons that have been solved by human societies with governance, rule of law and democracy.
The 'repositioning' of government and rules and regulations as a 'constraint' is fundamentally anti rule of law. Governments is 'you' in a democracy. Constraints and laws exists for businesses but also individuals, how will lifting constraints lead to a civilized society?
This promotes an unstable society that regresses to barbarism by those who want all the benefits of civilized society in terms of stability, peace, education, science and markets but do not want to think how this comes to be.
It is like a treadmill that keeps increasing speed. If you slow down, you are thrown out.
If consecutive quarterly results are not good, CEO is typically thrown out. This pressure forces management to make unnatural decisions that might help short-term, but will hurt long-term. What we are seeing with Google with all of these recent events/decisions is a result of this, IMO.
I do think shareholders are more than happy to see 10-20% in dividend returns annually. They're able to buy more stocks or diversify accordingly. I'm also okay with growth and reinvestment internally in a company (that tends to grow stock value). And it isn't an either/or issue.
What I don't think is reasonable is to see a given company try to get consistent growth in saturated markets they heavily control. It doesn't work, and trying to do so leads to horrible decision making in the longer term.
Continuous growth is sustainable at or below world economic growth. It is obviously not sustainable above as eventually you would become the entire economy and thus you would equal world economic growth. However, economics is not zero sum as our economies have pretty continuously grown for centuries and there is no limit on economic growth.
This is not true at all.
There are lots of companies out there that make a profit, and return those profits to shareholders via dividends.
If google wants to just continue making profits, they can just do that, and send that money back to the shareholders/owners, just like most every other company out there.
Hey, feel free to invest your retirement savings in a company that doesn't grow profits year after year, I'm sure you'll do great!
We would need to rework the whole system if we threw out the "constant growth" method of running a company. If we take care of the people so they don't have to worry about saving for retirement, it's possible to redesign the economy in this way and our goals as a society.
You obviously can't change one major axiom of the US economy without revisiting the remaining axioms!
Sustainability is more important than growth.
Not if such executives have controlling interest, which Google's execs do.
All major firms operating in China will have to have some sort of government connections who champion for them, otherwise its competitors will use their influence in government branches to put on more scrutiny on them, creating a competitive advantage.
At its core, this is not that different from major US firms having to have allies in media and Washington to avoid being heavily scrutinized. Although how the connections are established and how the influence is carried out might be new to US companies. Google will have to learn and compete at a disadvantage in the meantime.
Bing is allowed in china
>Google hurts its public image
Sure some people get hurts but for some other, for example if I can use google service without having to mess with vpn, it would be convenient.
> Bing is allowed in china
It's probably more accurate to say the Chinese government will not allow a foreign company to out-compete one of its local champion companies. The Chinese government is probably fine with Google being a minor player, but they'd start to have issues if it starts dominating Baidu.
Also, this is an old issue, Google in China.
I'm sure they won't start caring what a few outspoken individuals think by this point.
There's nothing wrong with making sure Baidu, Tencent and all the other big Chinese companies remain largely China-only companies.
No. China will let a foreign company compete against its home grown search engines under its own terms. There's no way we'd let a chinese company take over search in the US. Why should they allow an american search engine take over?
> By bowing to Chinese censorship, Google hurts its public image.
Google has bowed down to european and american censorship. What difference does it make if they bow to chinese censorship? You don't seem outraged at google censoring in the US and Europe.
> In short, the people at the top of Google look like fools to me.
Yeah. The multibillionaires look real foolish with their multibillions in the bank. Google execs don't care what employees think. It's not their job. They work for the shareholders, not their employees. Considering how well google's stock have been doing, it doesn't seem like shareholders are too shaken up about google getting back in china.
The faux moralizing is getting ridiculous. Especially when a significant portion of people on HN are demanding more censorship at home.
Why not? Korea and China dominate the manufacturing part, why should search be any different?
>Google hushing employees on Chinese search engine
https://www.axios.com/google-china-dragonfly-employees-searc...
How is this at all different from the US version?
$ curl -A 'Mozilla/5.0 (MSIE; Windows 10)' \
'https://www.google.com/search?safe=active&q=do+i+need+to+login' 2>/dev/null | \
tr '<>' '\n\n' | grep results
a class=gb1 href="https://www.youtube.com/results?gl=US&tab=w1"
All results
About 1,740,000,000 results
$They are as much of a de facto agent of the deep state at this point as Lockheed, and probably more pernicious due to their attempts to cultivate self-reinforcing political power to manipulate policy.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jared_Cohen
https://wikileaks.org/google-is-not-what-it-seems/
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/emails-show-google-e...
Your Washington examiner article falls short of saying that Google made any kind of illegal contributions. It also falls short of providing evidence that Google tried to rig any elections.
To clarify I’m not a google Stan, I don’t even use gmail, it’s just that Google isn’t the only American business to launch in China, why is google being singled out here?
Also, as far as timing, Google is being focused on now because they've just announced a major new product. Lots of other companies have been criticized in the past for complicity with China's brutal dictatorship.
What changed is Android, Google is losing a lot more than search, I've heard Android phones don't even work properly there. Apple phones work though.
If we ever get into a situation where the only companies that exist are megacorps, democracy will cease to exist; not only that but it will be impossible to reform the system in the future. The government will be too weak to regulate companies and people who work at those companies will not be able to protest for change because if they lose their jobs, there will be no alternative jobs for them to survive on.
It will be permanently locked in this dysfunctional state until the end of humanity.
I’ve noted my story before and everyone says that’s just how it goes. Ummm that’s how it went for Harvey Weinstein and Bill Cosby til it didn’t.
Wrong and horrible behavior will eventually catch up to you or any company!