Punishing Google for not being allowed to provide all content to the Chinese people is like punishing gun companies because they can't sellcertain gun in certain countries, including our own.
Google is providing valuable services to the Chinese people. Theya re giving them easier access to a wide variety of information, and the Chinese people are better off for having access to it.
Google cannot give those people access to information the Chinese government bans them from providing. They have no effective means of fighting the Chinese government on this. They can only withdraw from the market, and that harms the Chinese people and helps no one.
Google isn't helping oppress the Chinese pople any more than a firearms dealer in the US is helping our government oppress me by refusing to sell me a fully automatic weapon because the law prohibits it.
I'm also kind of baffled about how this author thinks "trade sanctions" are applicable? What's being traded? Google is providing services in China from Chinese based servers.
There's plenty of reasons for our government to be upset with the Chinese government including thier laws that prohibit the free flow of information to their people.
However, punishing Google for those laws is moronic.
I rarely directly insult anyone on this forum because it is not a persuasive argument. But I think you've opened the door by categorizing the outrage against this perversion as "moronic", so I respond in kind: you are, IMHO, a spineless moron of the first order.
It goes without saying that your analogy doesn't hold water. Google's product WAS a neutral compilation of where to get information available on the internet.
The only analogy that would hold with guns is if a foreign country demanded a gun manufacturer cheapen their product in such a way that using the product might kill or harm the user. The gun manufacturer would, of course, have an obligation not to cheapen their product to the point it might kill someone.
This deadly danger has apparently already occurred with Yahoo turning over records on one Chinese dissident and then that dissident was arrested and....oh, sorry, no information available on what happened to him.
I both apologize and am ashamed of the fact that fellow americans dash the hopes of freedom-yearning people in Red China that log on to the new google, that they have been clamoring for, only to find they have sold out. What harm to their collective psyches that must entail. It would be like having listened to radio free europe as your beacon of hope for years, and tuning in one day to find that your own government now controls the flow of information on that station.
Tell you what, Mr. idiot-electrical engineer savant, stick to your circuit boards and let the rest of us on freerepub defend your freedoms for you.