It seems impossible to find on Google but I know I remember reading that they refused to operate under Chinese law, so weren't allowed to operate there. IIRC something about them refusing to store Chinese data in China?

  • constellation [none/use name]
    ·
    2 years ago
    1. The Arab Spring. Color revolutions. Google was ecstatic. They were going to spark a revolt in China! Because they were strongly pro-free speech! (how times change)

    They were going to tear down China's government with all of their free information about how oppressive it was to live in China, and the best part was that China couldn't do anything about it! Speech wants to be free! :freeze-peach: (how times change)

    They were going to pull the rug out from the government that brought a billion people out of poverty and into the modern world, come hell or high water! They were going to put a billion people in a new age of chaos and war and damn anyone who would stop them! LOL they fucked around and found out. Turns out, you can block entire websites off the internet if you want. Google retreated to google.com.hk and huffed in the unique frustration that is a tech aristocracy being told they can't have everything they want. Then it turned out the Arab Spring was a total disaster and Egypt was put in the position of being a few weeks away from starvation. But don't listen to me, let's see the kind of situation they had planned for China.

    Last year I arrived early for a lunch address by Gen. Michael Hayden, who ran the National Security Agency and later the Central Intelligence Agency in the George W. Bush administration. Hayden was already there, and glad to chat. The conversation turned to Egypt, and I asked Hayden why the Republican mainstream had embraced the Muslim Brotherhood rather than the military government of President al-Sisi, an American-trained soldier who espoused a reformed Islam that would repudiate terrorism. "We were sorry that [Muslim Brotherhood leader Mohamed] Morsi was overthrown" in July 2013, Hayden explained. "We wanted to see what would happen when the Muslim Brotherhood had to take responsibility for picking up the garbage."

    "General," I remonstrated, "when Morsi was overthrown, Egypt had three weeks of wheat supplies on hand. The country was on the brink of starvation!"

    "I guess that experiment would have been tough on the ordinary Egyptian," Hayden replied, without a hint of irony.

    And of course, years later, we found that Google were heavily into censorship themselves. Not Chinese style of course! But penalizing sites so hard that they appear on page 134 of search results. Not so different.