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.
Comment on Apple is locking down the iPhone App Store to comply with a new law in China
ArbiterXero@lemmy.world 1 year agoOnly 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.
SnipingNinja@slrpnk.net 1 year ago
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.
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.
ArbiterXero@lemmy.world 1 year ago
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?