> Business don't decide that kind of things, consumers do.
This is a cop-out. Businesses have a responsibility for the decisions they make, and "it's profitable" should only be one factor.
> If there were clear intention from the majority of Western people to stop using every Google product the same second Google launch the censored search service in China, then Google would never do it.
I think you underestimate how much Google has become not just the default choice, but the only choice for a lot of people, who have never heard of alternatives and who use Google because it's what their browser defaults to (we even call the very act of running a search on the internet "Googling it"), and might not know how to switch, much less reasons why they should.
I find the "market forces will take care of it, and if they don't then people don't care" argument more than a little disingenuous, because it ignores the huge number of variables that account for why people choose product A over product Y that have nothing to do with the quality of the product or the company that makes it.
This is a cop-out. Businesses have a responsibility for the decisions they make, and "it's profitable" should only be one factor.
> If there were clear intention from the majority of Western people to stop using every Google product the same second Google launch the censored search service in China, then Google would never do it.
I think you underestimate how much Google has become not just the default choice, but the only choice for a lot of people, who have never heard of alternatives and who use Google because it's what their browser defaults to (we even call the very act of running a search on the internet "Googling it"), and might not know how to switch, much less reasons why they should.
I find the "market forces will take care of it, and if they don't then people don't care" argument more than a little disingenuous, because it ignores the huge number of variables that account for why people choose product A over product Y that have nothing to do with the quality of the product or the company that makes it.