You can choose not to abide by local laws and likely be shutdown entirely.
That way you’ll have effectively zero ability to influence local legislation / promote the interests of users.
Do you mean to imply you believe this would be a more optimal approach to the problem?
There’s perfect, and then there’s the dirty, mean, savage, brutal, beautiful world.
Edit to add:
> The company said it would no longer block accounts outside of mainland China at Beijing's request
Blocking accounts of non-Chinese at China’s request seem like an incredibly dumb move in the first instance.
I wonder what motivated them to comply with that request. Aren’t a lot of the Zoom devs based in China? It’d seem fairly trivial then for China to demand compliance via those employees based there.
People use this to rationalize continued involvement (often when it also happens to be profitable).
People can basically rationalize any bad behavior - it really seems like a skill that has no limits up to and including genocide.
In practice, I think the negative impact of helping to enable censorship for an authoritarian country outweighs whatever (likely zero) influence you’d believe you’d have.
Sometimes to be on the right side of history the right thing to do is to walk away.
"Sometimes to be on the right side of history the right thing to do is to walk away."
This is not a Google-like situation - for Zoom 'walking way' effectively means shutting down. They are very heavily Chinese based.
In the longer term, they could move operations, in which case the choice would be 'walk away from China' - but right now, it's more existential than that.
I don't think the good people have to do nothing, they can work to help users circumvent the firewall via things like tor.
It's really tempting to think that you're the good person helping in a messy situation (especially when it's also the easiest option to choose), but ultimately I think it's just rationalizing bad behavior.
I think most people believe they're 'good', even those doing the censorship in China do it under some belief that they're keeping stability and unity to prevent Trump like stupidity and western influence - or the rise of religious extremism. They're regular people doing regular jobs for something they think is good.
I think the actions matter, when you're doing bad things for some ambiguous influence I'm not sure how good you really are.
That way you’ll have effectively zero ability to influence local legislation / promote the interests of users.
Do you mean to imply you believe this would be a more optimal approach to the problem?
There’s perfect, and then there’s the dirty, mean, savage, brutal, beautiful world.
Edit to add:
> The company said it would no longer block accounts outside of mainland China at Beijing's request
Blocking accounts of non-Chinese at China’s request seem like an incredibly dumb move in the first instance.
I wonder what motivated them to comply with that request. Aren’t a lot of the Zoom devs based in China? It’d seem fairly trivial then for China to demand compliance via those employees based there.