Google in China would have been a way for Google (and Western Democracies) to get the most current listing of what China is asking companies to filter.
Whatever China was not comfortable asking international companies to filter (it shows to others things that Chinese government is trying to control), would have been shown by google to Chinese users by default.
Question for the google engineers here objecting to filtered products in China...
Is the right to restrict right to the outcome of ones labor after it is sold universal? Who else would you grant the right to restrict the fruits of their labor from being used by you if they don't agree with you on something that may be important to them?
Can a coal miner ask the utility company to stop electrical service to the parents of a google engineer residing in heartland? If no, why not?
Why can't the baker deny decorating a cake a certain way against their will?
If you are asking for a ethical right to deny basic things (internet search is just about there as electricity, food, shelter, emergency care), just imagine if all the things you depend on came with similar exceptions that excluded you from using it.
I would have imagined lot of googlers taking objection to blatant content/speech suppression on YouTube. But they are completely fine if it is their ideology winning as a outcome of a said effort, no matter the ethics.
This makes sense when the price for discovery itself is very high compared to putting it into use.
In many fields (especially IT/software/algorithms), the discovery/invention often isn't the main part of work (especially not when you look at what are the actual claims of many inventions in those fields), but creating a good implementation and/or improving on it.
There's a reason that software and algorithms weren't deemed patentable for a long time (and still aren't in certain jurisdictions - at least on paper).
People spend resources trying to discover things because they want to use them. If it turns out that when you go to use your invention, a patent troll jumps out from under the bridge to shake you down, people will be less inclined to spend resources trying to invent new things to use and instead just stick to the status quo.
File a defect log to the book of Genesis, assign it to original developer, the God himself.
Why are you surprised that humans are being humans?
Why can't you put trust into the fact that there are more people being good most of the time.
Internet tools should be like paper and pencil, opinionless. Pencil maker doesn't get to control what gets written by the pencil, a social media platform maker doesn't get to control what gets said on the platform. Only when legally required, the pencil may be seized; only when legally required a social media post be taken down.
If with the protection and power of USA we can't stand by the Freedom of Expression in the marketplace of ideas, we are doomed to get an authoritarian overlords.
This "I don't like this free and open internet" because my ideas are losing is very dangerous power grab.
I don't like Facebook either, but I actually very much like the part where they want to let people talk knowing fully well that what gets said would range from Nobel Peace prize worthy, to undesired, to wanting to burn the whole universe down.
Can you imagine Bic worrying like this about what someone might write using their pens?
Do you imagine the restaurant worker who served breakfast to the 9/11 hijackers having second thoughts about serving food?
Answer to Facebook's woes is to return to Free Speech with compliance with law enforcement if laws are broken. No proactive banning of speech with the fear that it might be illegal. Let the legal process enforce laws, Facebook should comply with lawful orders to take down content, but not before. Facebook should embrace bubbles. Let people chose the bubbles they live in and let advertisers choose bubbles that they advertise in. If a advertiser doesn't want to advertise in "self-defense" bubble, then any content tagged/identified/categorized as "self-defense" doesn't get ads from that advertiser. Make people explicitly aware that there are bubbles out there that they can choose to be part of, or choose to be excluded from, or choose to peek inside for just a bit. Make default no-login/under-age view safe i.e. at least 1k logged-in views where at least 20 people did not raise "inappropriate content" flag.
Free Speech, embrace bubbles, comply with law enforcement and that should make Facebook relevant again.
YouTube and Reddit should be like paper and pencil.
If I used paper and pencil to break the law, then it's between law enforcement and me, I would be super annoyed if the pencil refused to write what I want to write because the pencil manufacturer thought it might be illegal or just simply undesired.
What the Content Providers are doing is anti-thesis of neutrality towards ideas and the supporting arguments. If someone breaks the law using their platform then let the someone file a complaint and let law enforcement handle it.
Should the burrito truck ban you from utilizing the calories from the breakfast burrito if you intend to do some insider trading that morning? If the burrito place can't block you from eating, then why should YouTube and Reddit be able to block you from saying what you have to say?
Can't believe that the hacker news crowd was jumping up and down for months at a time for neutrality of packets as if ISP is going to stop you from saying what you want to say, but all the while Facebook/Google/Twitter/Reddit can stop you from saying what you say anytime they feel like it, and those advocating "Neutrality of service providers" are perfectly fine with it.
Can folks be little more realistic about what the real danger is?
Rampant shadow-banning on HN if you comment on immigration or terrorism or Net-Neutrality that the PC crowd doesn't agree to.
I am sure this comment will only be seen by me, only through this browser.
Peter Thiel or Sam Altman speak for free speech, yet HN comment auditors keep using their jurisdiction in deciding what is OK and what is not.
Lot of work that engineers do and then social operatives hijack the work and enforce their agenda on top of that engineering work.
I have no clue how they feel being American, operating on American soil, under the protection of American law enforcement, and at the same time stopping American people from having a discussion, that too after specifically creating a platform for that very reason... to have a public discussion.
This is same crowd that gets angry when ISPs want to kick out a packet that the ISP doesn't like, but are super comfortable blocking, hiding and in case of reddit even editing user's comments. How they are able to hold this cognitive dissonance in their head at the same time is beyond me.
I am sure nobody will read this but at least I said it. Hi, HN auditors, have a wonderful day full of opportunities to ban users and comments, enjoy!!!
I suspect this was killed more for striking too close to home than for tone. It reminds one of this passage:
> "The prohibition will be strongest when the group is nervous. The irony of Galileo's situation was that he got in trouble for repeating Copernicus's ideas. Copernicus himself didn't. In fact, Copernicus was a canon of a cathedral, and dedicated his book to the pope. But by Galileo's time the church was in the throes of the Counter-Reformation and was much more worried about unorthodox ideas."
Why should the society pay for your dream to have a chance to be reality?
Startups with few heads have taken down companies that had employed hundreds gainfully for life, only to be folded into another behemoth with all the evil intentions. Whatsapp acquisition by Facebook where they decided to look into messages for profiling comes to mind. Countless examples of startups being open to being bought only to leave the customers hanging dry for options.
Do you agree to keep cost of shipping same no matter the size of your account (shipping one container vs. shipping thousands a month) so that some dreamer logistics graduate can compete? Would you pay to keep it fair? How about a pharma grad and keeping things equal against big pharma? Should you be taxed to pay for FDA approval process of every drug that a pharma student comes up with?
I am for Net Neutrality because doing otherwise turns paying customers into a product, and that goes against the contract. As an ISP customer, I am not willing to be made inaccessible by someone that I want to talk to, specifically when I am paying for that access.
At this point I am more concerned about Facebook/Twitter/Reddit/Google's ability to discriminate against people, than Comcast/TimeWarner/Verizon/AT&T's ability to discriminate against my packets. The later is hypothetical, the former is an everyday reality.
Freedom of expression is more important than cost imposed on buying the paper to write your expressions on. Net Neutrality is fighting over ability to write what you want on the paper you bought without the paper manufacturer consenting to your writing. Doesn't happen with paper, doesn't happen with packets. But the ability to show your writing on the paper to other people, their ability to read what you have written is being undermined, tampered with without repercussions, daily, every second of the day by Facebook/Twitter/Google/Reddit.
Net Neutrality is not the fight of the day, the battle cry is Freedom of Expression, fight against censorship imposed by Facebook/Google/Twitter/Reddit/YouTube.
Viking raided silk traders travelling far, or raided people who had access to those traders, traders who were either wearing or selling the silk cloth with pattern.
You have to look at the garments in the mirror in order to see the word Allah so it could just as well be random patterns, like that piece of toast with Jesus' face on it.
>People generally do love Silicon Valley and what it creates. It’s the media that doesn’t.
The problem is Google/YouTube, Facebook, Reddit and Twitter are behaving like media companies of past century. They wasted no time in doing that. Amazon + Washington Post is perfect example of bridge from one to other.
May be it would take Silicon Valley (creative minds not necessarily located just in few zip-codes in CA) to take down the giants that are Google/YouTube, Facebook and Twitter, or at least make them behave.
Reddit leadership team must be made to stand in front of photo of Aaron Swartz for one minute each day and be reminded of the cause. May be, just may be then the love would return.
I think we as society have lost the ability to give the kids a creative space, that used to be a mile away from homes where they can play in the sand and bushes and water, and just be kids, without adult supervision. Video games let kids experience creation. Video games are satisfying an evolutionary need.
I think nautil.us should write an article on positive effects of mobile phone connectivity. The snobs are looking down on that just like they are on video games.
Urban centers through most of human history have lacked a lot of open spaces, and kids have grown up fine. Human brains are incredibly resilient, and you can raise healthy kids even in dense urban areas.
The problem seems to be more about the constant stimuli that comes from internet enabled devices and video games. I grew up without access to much video games or the internet but that made me dream up entire fantasy worlds as a kid, because I was bored. I don't think the current environment allows kids that kind of space to just be bored and create things via imagination.
I'm not a child specialist though so I might be totally wrong about this.
If you read "death and life of great American cities", Jane Jacobs touches on this quite a bit. Urban centers do offer a lot to children growing up. It offers freedom and unstructured play time, which is important. kids are able to explore easily in an urban environment, if it is walkable, and safe. Safety comes from mixed use urban planning that adds many eyes and feet on the street that keep areas safe and welcoming. This also benefits children since even if they come across a Bully, there are multiple escape paths, and a plethora of adults to around to step in. Large open spaces lead to fewer adults around during unstructured play. Children need both unstructured and structured time.
>Urban centers through most of human history have lacked a lot of open spaces
For most of human history transportation through urban centers was done primarily on foot and roads were designed to facilitate that. Contemporary urban planning is designed around speedily moving motorized vehicles through and the streets, such as they are, are rivers of traffic that pedestrians have to hurry themselves across during the short windows of time that cars aren't speeding by.
The invention of the automobile has been terrible for letting kids roam around. On the flip-side of the dangers they face in urban centers, the ones growing up in newer suburban areas lack the density to have an appreciable amount of kids of similar ages within walking/biking distance of each other. Many older style, "streetcar" suburbs do, but we haven't build many of those in the past 30 or so years.
"streetcar" density suburbs can and do function well with only cars. We just need to start building them again. Just sprinkle in a few multi-story parking lots behind street-level retail and they are great places to live.
Whatever China was not comfortable asking international companies to filter (it shows to others things that Chinese government is trying to control), would have been shown by google to Chinese users by default.
Question for the google engineers here objecting to filtered products in China... Is the right to restrict right to the outcome of ones labor after it is sold universal? Who else would you grant the right to restrict the fruits of their labor from being used by you if they don't agree with you on something that may be important to them?
Can a coal miner ask the utility company to stop electrical service to the parents of a google engineer residing in heartland? If no, why not?
Why can't the baker deny decorating a cake a certain way against their will?
If you are asking for a ethical right to deny basic things (internet search is just about there as electricity, food, shelter, emergency care), just imagine if all the things you depend on came with similar exceptions that excluded you from using it.
I would have imagined lot of googlers taking objection to blatant content/speech suppression on YouTube. But they are completely fine if it is their ideology winning as a outcome of a said effort, no matter the ethics.