After Employee Revolt, Google Says It's 'Not Close' To Launching Search In China (arstechnica.com)

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Reports from earlier this month claimed Google was working on products for the Chinese market, detailing plans for a search engine and news app that complied with the Chinese government's censorship and surveillance demands. The news was a surprise to many Googlers, and yesterday an article from The New York Times detailed a Maven-style internal revolt at the company. Fourteen hundred employees signed a letter demanding more transparency from Google's leadership on ethical issues, saying, "Google employees need to know what we're building." The letter says many employees only learned about the project through news reports and that "currently we do not have the information required to make ethically informed decisions about our work, our projects, and our employment."

According to a report from The Wall Street Journal, Google addressed the issue of China at this week's all-hands meeting. The report says CEO Sundar Pichai told employees the company was "not close to launching a search product" in China but that Pichai thinks Google can do good by engaging with China. "I genuinely do believe we have a positive impact when we engage around the world," The Journal quotes Pichai as say, "and I don't see any reason why that would be different in China." The report says Brin "sounded optimistic about doing more business in China" but that Brin called progress in the country "slow-going and complicated."

Comments

Keep it Down Home

[Kunedog]

Don't send our thought police overseas when they are badly needed to carry out political censorship at home, especially before the elections!

Re:Keep it Down Home

[elrous0]

At this point I would be surprised if, by the 2020 election, there are even a small handful of conservative voices who haven't been completely banned for YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, etc. Alex Jones was a kook, but he was just the low-hanging fruit they used to set a precedent. Anyone who thinks he'll be the last conservative voice effectively banished from the internet is kidding themselves.

They start with the kooks, then they go after the semi-kooks, then they go after the controversial, then the semi-controversial....and by the 2020 election pretty much anyone to the right of Che Guevara is a persona non grata on the modern internet. And that's how democracy dies. Say anything you want as long as no one can hear you.

Re:Keep it Down Home

[Mashiki]

Every four years, the other side has the chance to do the same thing itself. Apparently this is a venerable American tradition...

There's a problem with your reasoning. The progressive left, and in general political left across the west have been frothing at the mouth and pushing to censor people for the better part of 15 years now. Now you've got an entire group of people that believe that free speech should be restricted if it hurts feelings and/or desire to expand hate speech laws to cover feelings. If you don't think so, you haven't really been paying attention. Things like deplatforming, pulling fire alarms, calling in bomb threats, and so on have been a staple for quite a while. The last oh 7-8 years or so, they've started moving directly into violence. You can see that with antifa most prominently, but can find it with any communist linked group in pretty much any country in Canada, US, or various EU countries.

Universities are pretty damned cancerous these days in terms of stifling speech outside of what's approved, even here in Canada. The debacle with Lindsay Shepard is a good example, especially since these self declared liberals are now labeled as far-right by various media outlets, student unions, student groups, and so on.

"Not close to launching" is not a denial

[drnb]

"Not close to launching" is not a denial of working on a censored and surveilled product. To be fair though, if that's what the local law require then they have no choice if they want to make a buck, excuse me, "engage with" such a country.

Chinese Darwin Award

[alternative_right]

Of course Chinese workers all unite to praise Glorious Leader Xi Jinping's glorious censorship program....or else.

More importantly, those who do not praise the Chinese State tend to fail at a form of natural selection, mainly by experiencing 7.62mm tumors at the base of the skull. Therefore, they no longer exist on Chinese development teams, and everyone else eats their rice.

Re:The employees only support censorship of their

[Atomic Fro]

They are becoming the corporate equivalent of the Evergreen College. The investors should be calling for Pichai's head. The employees in non-leadership positions should not be dictating the company's direction by mob rule.

Re:Differences in censorship

[Actually, I do RTFA]

Most of our conservatives, in the context of history, are fairly Left-leaning. They support egalitarianism in politics and society; the only area they do not support it is the economy...

Except for gay marriage, voting rights, felon disenfranchisement, prayer in school, mandatory standing for the national anthem, etc. And, depending on where the line is drawn for "most conservatives", active and vocal parts are significantly against equality with regard to gender, race and religion.

...[the economy,] where they insist on free markets instead of enforced socioeconomic equality.

I've never heard of anyone serious wanting enforced equality. To say those are the two positions is stupid and wrong.