The two latest articles from last week on HN about how Google is prepping to fully endorse China's censorship were posing these questions in the two most upvoted comments :
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17685248
"Why is it unethical to launch a censored search product in China?"
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17703524
"What's the slippery slope here?"
Well, you have your answer today.
The unethical slippery slope is this one: when you start accepting censorship where do you stop?
Since this "ahoy" plug-in is making China's censorship inefficient, the logical step is to ban it to respect China's will to censor. But you have to ban it from everybody right? Otherwise, some people in China could access it with a VPN or a proxy.
So here we are.
In order to get a "attaboy" from China, Google starts censoring tools globally on their Chrome Store.
With great power comes great responsibility would say Ben Parker. So yes, IMHO even companies should have some kind of "morality", some redline they should/would not cross. Google used to have one not so long ago "Don't be evil", but that's ancient history.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17685248 "Why is it unethical to launch a censored search product in China?"
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17703524 "What's the slippery slope here?"
Well, you have your answer today.
The unethical slippery slope is this one: when you start accepting censorship where do you stop?
Since this "ahoy" plug-in is making China's censorship inefficient, the logical step is to ban it to respect China's will to censor. But you have to ban it from everybody right? Otherwise, some people in China could access it with a VPN or a proxy.
So here we are.
In order to get a "attaboy" from China, Google starts censoring tools globally on their Chrome Store.
With great power comes great responsibility would say Ben Parker. So yes, IMHO even companies should have some kind of "morality", some redline they should/would not cross. Google used to have one not so long ago "Don't be evil", but that's ancient history.