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.
One way to look at it is what is best in the real world for actual Chinese citizens. On one hand we have Apple, who generally does the bare minimum to comply with Chinese regulations and occasionally picks its battles on what things are worth pushing back on and which are worth just dealing with. On the other hand we have every Chinese service provider, all of whom bend over backwards not only to comply with their legal requirements to go above and beyond to do whatever the party wants. The government doesn't even really need to censor people's chats because the companies happily do it themselves.
Are Chinese citizens better off without iMessage and FaceTime, fully end-to-end encrypted services? Are they better off with a phone that is sending all of their usage data to a Chinese company?
Apple could refuse to operate in the Chinese market on principle and feel very haughty about itself, but that wouldn't make the life of its former customers any better.
ArbiterXero@lemmy.world 1 year ago
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.
ReallyActuallyFrankenstein@lemmynsfw.com 1 year ago
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.
ArbiterXero@lemmy.world 1 year ago
2019, and only after it was exposed and they got bad press in the USA.
en.m.wikipedia.org/…/Dragonfly_(search_engine)
ReallyActuallyFrankenstein@lemmynsfw.com 1 year ago
Google withdrew from China overall in 2010. They moved some portion to Hong Kong but stopped censoring search results.
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.
SnipingNinja@slrpnk.net 1 year ago
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.
ArbiterXero@lemmy.world 1 year ago
My point is that they were fine censoring search for a long time so it seems unlikely that the censorship was the issue.