Honestly, it's probably a good thing for YouTube to be available in Russia. It allows for western media to be seen by their population. If Russians only had access to Russian and Chinese media, the propaganda machine would be much stronger.
Now I'm not saying Google is a charity. They are probably also making money, but there's a non-zero chance someone thought about not cutting them off for non-monetary reasons.
It's not cynical, it's a fundamental feature of massive corporations. No human, whether the CEO or other individual in power, can impose empathic, moral, or ethical considerations that violate the primary profit driver. Companies that violate the profit incentive don't survive, or never get big enough to be relevant.
Companies that don't have to worry about censorship compliance accept the occasional PR hits when it's discovered that China, yet again, continues to use slave and child labor, or unethically sourced resources, etc.
It's not a conspiracy or cabal or an intentional cluster of power brokers, it's a component feature of the marketplace and suite of international rules and regulations governing the operation of corporations.
There are lobbyists and policy wonks and think tanks fiercely debating the minutiae and pushing their findings on lawmakers and regulatory agencies. Then there is an ebb and flow of regulations and enforcement, and public perception and reputation, and finally labor, material, and overhead. The sum total of all those things drive the decisions made by massive corporations based on profit potential for any particular choice. Sometimes it costs less to pay for influence than to pay for compliance if regulation increases. Sometimes it costs less to comply, and varying timeframes and political regimes can affect long term strategies.
The only way ethics and morality ever become relevant to corporate strategy is if the public perception and reputation components are affected. If a PR campaign and fluff pieces can mitigate a temporary hit over some unethical move, they'll inevitably make the unethical moves. In massive bureaucracies, humans are distanced from responsibility for these decisions through institutional inertia and being more or less powerless to defy the overall corporate organism's behavior and incentives. Companies that correctly value and account for all these factors will succeed against companies that do not.
Where individuals or small activist groups succeed in overriding corporate level incentives, the company will almost always, inevitably, lose money and market share. If it's not illegal, it's fair game. If it's illegal, it's still fair game if it's profitable. If it's not profitable, it's not a valid choice.
We'd need a regulatory system with teeth that forces companies to be accountable for all of the mass surveillance, exploitative labor, unethical resource acquisition, and other maladaptive behaviors at a global level. Megacorporations pay a metric ton of lobbyists to fight against change in that direction, because it would significantly reduce short term profit potential.
Individuals stop mattering to corporations past a certain size unless there's a PR angle. Even if the CEO is the best, most moral, most superbly ethical person in history, the rules of the game don't give them any effective power with which to impact the company's behavior. There are literally millions of examples of this malignant feature of our modern marketplace. Despite that, it works fairly well, and people can usually find justice in the most egregious cases of abuse and damages. There are mechanisms for course correction baked in, and civil activism can occasionally push a human interest issue with enough energy that the profit impact results in The Right Thing™.
This isn't cynicism, it's simply how these massive corporations work. They're dehumanizing and awful, but they're also incredibly efficient and profitable, and it's often the case that the overall net benefit to humanity exceeds the ugly and exploitative negative externalities. It's very easy to get lost in the gray area and lose sight of right and wrong, but as long as we keep shifting toward "better" then maybe it's an overall good.
And if a company violates your own boundaries of right and wrong, you can decline to use their products or do business with them. Well, unless it's Google, or Facebook, or any other global surveillance harvesting company, or the credit bureaus, or companies that use conflict minerals, or child or slave labor, or... yeah, you know, maybe we need a few small tweaks.
Don't be silly. Infrastructure and an ops team aren't meaningful costs in relation to the money to be made there. China is 1/6th of the world economy.
And for example Apple is absolutely minting money there, giving full cooperation to the CCP including handing over user data thousands of times per year, with no PR consequences at all. Even on HN, let alone with the general public.
Now, it is true that there would be PR consequences for Google specifically, since there is a double standard at play. In this case it's a self-inflicted double standard, since they left China in the first place. But would those consequences be durable? It's hard to say. Google's leadership under Pichai has been incredibly risk averse, so it makes sense they're not taking that gamble just like they're taking no other gambles.
But it's definitely not obvious that the costs of operating in China would exceed the benefits.
And they are very efficient.
>And if a company violates your own boundaries of right and wrong, you can decline to use their products or do business with them.
I just want to say - the best (and the only) way to fix something is to regulate the companies. The slavery and child labor didn't stop because CEOs had a change of hearts, but because they were made illegal. Boycott is not enough, people should vote and lobby to make immoral things illegal.
