>every tech company engages in regulatory alignment for the entire Middle East

Can someone expand on this a bit? I'm passingly familiar with the Chinese Google example (though I thought Google left the market rather than bend the knee?) but I know nearly nothing about the Middle East angle.

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j16sdiz a day ago | parent | next [-]

They bend the knee for censorship requirement. (Not only that, they provided machine learning based filtering service for other Chinese search engine at the time)

According to Google, the China government tried to infiltrate Google's internal computer system. In response, Google stopped the censorship over night, and withdraw from China market shortly afterward.

I still remember night, when _all_ Chinese search engine stopped censoring because Google stopped their filtering service.

The China tech company have evolved much since those days, and they are now much better at censoring compare to what Google had in the early days of the internet.

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phantom784 19 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I worked for a company that asked users for their gender, with language along the lines of "choose the gender that best matches your identity."

There was a special case for Middle Eastern countries that removed this language.

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jjmarr 15 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

On a photocopier, if I switch the language to Arabic, Hebrew disappears from the list of options.

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thaumasiotes a day ago | parent | prev [-]

> though I thought Google left the market rather than bend the knee?

Not even close. They bent the knee first; they left afterwards.

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nl a day ago | parent | next [-]

Not at all. They refused Chinese requests, left the market and closed offices.

Still the gold standard for how US companies should have responded to Chinese censorship demands.

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mda 20 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Can you explain what do you mean?

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thaumasiotes 16 hours ago | parent [-]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_China

> On 26 January 2006, Google launched its China-based google.cn search page, with results subject to censorship by the Chinese government.

> In January 2010, Google announced that, in response to a Chinese-originated hacking attack on them and other US tech companies, they were no longer willing to censor searches in China and would pull out of the country completely if necessary.

They never had a problem censoring their results. They claimed to pull out "in retaliation" for being hacked; realistically, they noticed that China didn't want them to succeed, and gave up on trying.

	▲	hn_throwaway_99 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I think that's leaving out a lot of context that the "Controversies" section of that Wikipedia entry, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_China#Controversies, better explains. First, in 2006, there was still a general belief I think that Western companies could profitably exist in China and be, if not a "force for good", than at least a force for slightly more openness. Google's options were either to not be in China at all, or to be in China and abide by their laws. So when they censored search results in the 2006-2010 time period, at least they told you they were doing it and that it was at the demands of Chinese authorities. I think it's a fair debate to have on either side whether this was a good thing, but I think it's a gross oversimplification to present that this was a simple black-and-white decision and that Google "never had a problem censoring their results."