Joining Apple, Amazon’s China Cloud Service Bows to Censors

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/01/business/amazon-china-internet-censors-apple.html

153 164 9 years ago

micaksica• 9 years ago

In case you assumed that corporate responsibility is actually taken to heart by those making corporate strategic decisions, let this show you that it is not. Corporate responsibility moves are little more than good PR, a product selling point, and a way to avoid fines in some jurisdictions. Money matters more than morals. These corporations want access to the Chinese market. To gain access (and profit from) to the Chinese market, you must play ball with the state.

mc32• 9 years ago

When has that ever been in doubt with regard to China? To do any major business in China you have to partner with a local company --which typically have ties to the CCP.

This is nothing new. Is there a difference btwn opening factories in China and legally outsourcing work to local cos which may or may not comply with even local labor and environmental laws and bowing to their local mores when it comes to softer areas like western ideas about civil liberties? That in no way means I agree with their view --I'm just asking are the two not different sides of the same coin and we (the "west") pretty much fully accepted the one side a long time ago.

mooreds• 9 years ago

I remember reading about this decades ago in "One World, Ready or Not" by Greider: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/285435.One_World_Ready_o...

Well worth the read to understand the different forces tugging on global corporations.

madeofpalk3• 9 years ago

Maybe there's a middleground? You've still got to pick your battles and understand the scope of them. It's also entirely reasonable for a company to not to choose to follow a particular fight because it's too expensive or would have to much of an impact on the strategy of the company.

If a company decides to not fund healthcare for everyone in the US, even if that aligned with their values and CSR, there's no need to take a cynical look at that.

QAPereo• 9 years ago

Definitely a middle ground but that's not what is being occupied here.

jjoonathan• 9 years ago

Aiding Chinese censorship for a quick buck is your idea of a "reasonable middleground"?

l04m33• 9 years ago

Agreed. In China, the government controls the flow of money. Sadly, there's a saying among us Chinese netizens: "China is now powerful/rich enough, that no one can actually save us from it."

ttflee3• 9 years ago

China is a giant corporation-like kleptocracy, the product of which is the labour of Chinese people. Now that the population that output cheap labour wanes as the demographic data deteriorates. Situations will change.

est2• 9 years ago

fyi AWS China is different from aws worldwide. It has its own portal https://www.amazonaws.cn, different set of services, policies, etc.

Many cool fancy new features on aws worldwide is not available on aws china. Some of the differences even breaks third party libraries. e.g. some version of boto.

subway• 9 years ago

GovCloud is isolated an a very similar manner, though still operated by AWS.

CN is operated (and likely owned) by a party other than Amazon, as Amazon ownership would make the org ineligible for an ICP (as of 2014, anyway)

lostmsu8• 9 years ago

Does it belong to Amazon.com or does it not?

est2• 9 years ago

Aws has the tech stack, the datacenter is joint venture.

Johnny555• 9 years ago

Depends what you mean by "belong to", from the linked article:

China requires foreign companies have a local partner and restricts them from owning a controlling stake in any cloud company

sergiotapia2• 9 years ago

What are they supposed to do? Either they comply or they leave the Chinese market. It's that simple. I hope people don't fault these companies for playing ball with a communist government.

ngold• 9 years ago

That is what I was curious about. That is a country four times the size of America. It would be interesting to see how the conversation went in Apples and Amazons board room though.

treme• 9 years ago

"We rollin'?"

"We rollin'"

option2• 9 years ago

They do have influence here (in US) and there (in China). They should certainly comply with law and push for change together with US government. If change is not happening and laws aren't just then they certainly should leave.

Noxchi• 9 years ago

Certainly should leave?

Veratyr2• 9 years ago

Perhaps a naïve question but I mean it honestly: What relevance does communism have here? Is "communist" just being used as a synonym for corrupt or is there another meaning?

I'm not American so I suspect I don't associate communism with the same things you do.

jmknoll• 9 years ago

The Chinese government calls itself a communist government. I think the above comment is using communist as shorthand for 'authoritarianism clothed in communism,' which is normally the way things have turned out (USSR, China, Vietnam).

cgmg• 9 years ago

"Communist" implies authoritarian, as in a one-party state.

sergiotapia2• 9 years ago

I'm not American either, I'm Bolivian.

cooper12• 9 years ago

Not the dreaded "C" word! Thank god capitalist countries have such outstanding human rights records.

veidr2• 9 years ago

I take your point, but China specifically has an absysmal, wretched human rights record.

am19885• 9 years ago

China has an appalling human rights record and they aren't trying to get much better.

veidr2• 9 years ago

Yes, playing ball with a despotic authoritarian regime is precisely what people are faulting these companies for.

A lot of companies left the market in South Africa market in the 1980s, to which the parallels are obvious.

But they didn't do it because they suddenly woke up and felt like doing the right thing; they did it because people's outrage over human rights in South Africa began to threaten the profits gained from playing ball there[1].

That's why articles like this one are important.

[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1986/11/17/t...

mistermann9• 9 years ago

South Africa is tiny, China is an 800 pound gorilla upon which the majority of the world's manufacturing depends. The decision of whether to "play ball" with China needs to be made at the government level, and 10+ years ago. It's too late now, the horse is out of the barn. China, and only China, will decide how they act on the world stage.

pera2• 9 years ago

Which basically ends up to the classic deontological vs consequentialist ethic theories. I believe though that if enough companies like Amazon and Google won't accept the conditions imposed by the government then, after some time, they may decide to change their politics.

CountSessine4• 9 years ago

Sure. A cabal of tough-as-nails Chinese leaders who lived through the cultural revolution and command the largest standing army on earth will change their politics because Jeff Bezos gives them the cold shoulder.

This is western arrogance at its peak.

johnvonneumann• 9 years ago

"All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing."

lstroud2• 9 years ago

I thought you were only supposed to comply with laws you like. ;)

lostmsu8• 9 years ago

Should I, an employee of Amazon, quit, if I do not support this policy?

madeofpalk3• 9 years ago

That's going to be up to you, the Amazon employee.

Personally, I'm able to distinguish myself from the company and I my identity isn't the company's, so I wouldn't see a need to quit my job over something like this.

lostmsu8• 9 years ago

Any company is a sum of its employees. One certainly is part of the company's identity.

vonkow• 9 years ago

That's going to be up to you, the Amazon employee.

Personally, I'm unwilling to work for a company who's values are in severe opposition to my own, so I would probably quit my job over something like this (if I felt strongly enough about it).

lostmsu8• 9 years ago

Have to admit, perhaps that thought only came so strong because of me literally yesterday reading https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiananmen_Square_protests_of_1... , knowing about this information being censored in China, and, suddenly, Amazon submissing to government to prevent people from accessing it. Right now feels too dramatic.

option2• 9 years ago

If you are software engineer, then you are spoiled for choice. When I left Bing, their censorship in China (unlike Google) was a minor reason for me leaving. So, while it wasn't the reason, it did contribute to my decision to leave. And, again, we (SWEs) are spoiled for choice, hence taking issues like this into the account is certainly possible.

ballade• 9 years ago

That's going to be up to you, the amazon employee.

memset• 9 years ago

(Unrelated: is this a reference that I don't get? 4 people have responded with exactly this!)

Gigablah• 9 years ago

That's going to be up to you, the Amazon employee.

codedokode• 9 years ago

That makes no sence. Any company would try to maximize its profit in such situation, so if you don't like this you will have to become self-employed.

mahyarm• 9 years ago

Any tech bigco will probably have something you are uncomfortable with, it pretty much become inevitable at that stage.

dis-sys3• 9 years ago

with Amazon's wildly reported low retention rate, you are going to leave in a few months anyway.

https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2015-08-17/a-job-at-...

bdcravens• 9 years ago

I wonder how much a publicly traded company could act upon their values, as opposed to the primary value of seeking value for shareholders. For instance, if an Apple or Amazon takes a stand and ends up having to pull out of China, would that be grounds for a shareholder lawsuit?

abecedarius• 9 years ago

I haven't heard of any such lawsuit against Google.

jimmywanger• 9 years ago

Google wasn't giving up too much in China. The search engine wasn't getting much tractions, based on differing asthetics.

Chinese websites are far more clustered and busy - take a look at https://world.taobao.com/. I guess that it's being shifted - baidu seems relatively uncluttered, but the Chinese aesthetic is cramming as much information as possible on the same web page.

adventured4• 9 years ago

Shareholder lawsuits are among the least worrisome for a public corporation. They happen frequently. They very, very rarely end up adding up to anything that matters.

Why is that? There's an extraordinarily high bar to jump over if you're a shareholder and you want to sue and win, when it comes to showing damages from a corporation's decisions. I should emphasize it again: the bar is extraordinarily high.

It's so high, it's difficult for shareholder lawsuits to prevail against companies like Valeant Pharmaceuticals.

yingliu4203• 9 years ago

Eventually they will find out that the cost is too high and the profit is too low. The make deal with Satan

reustle• 9 years ago

I'm sure they've spent plenty of time running the numbers

mtgx2• 9 years ago

Yes, and did they take into account a backstabbing from the Chinese government (both national and local) and the stealing and then re-using of their IP for the purpose of replacing them in China in due time?

They are public corporations. They probably only took into account the next 2 years of profits they could make there, put it in balance and said "yup, betraying our Chinese users as well as our principles is worth it."

But is it? Will it be? We'll see.

radicaldreamer2• 9 years ago

It's no surprise. Even if Apple or Amazon wanted to resist this, they won't get any competent support from the current US administration. The strategy for the time being seems to be "don't rock the boat" for US businesses right now.

rasz• 9 years ago

Strategy has always been dont rock the boat, just as during dismantling of US car industry, or TV industry.

Frontline: Coming From Japan [The Fall Of The US Television Industry] (1992) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aesJTsZqm6c

adventured4• 9 years ago

just as during dismantling of US car industry

GM and Ford sales: $317 billion

Dismantling, no. What actually happened, is the global market for automobiles drastically expanded from ~1960 forward with globalization and equally dramatic increases in the global median standard of living. Ford and GM didn't get dismantled, they gained a large number of new, competent international competitors that divided up a radically larger global pie.

Further, see: automobile production within the US by Toyota et al. which is vast. That counts as part of the US car industry.

ams61102• 9 years ago

What? Why do they need support from the adminstration. Either they do business in China, and implicity endorse all the anti-freedom, or they do not. Sure it would cost them revenue and share price. Well right and wrong are not economic propositions.

lstroud2• 9 years ago

Seems like we've had these Engagement vs Isolation conversations before in the US.

radicaldreamer2• 9 years ago

Because even the largest companies (especially the largest companies) rely heavily on the organs of government to help negotiate and solve issues which are geopolitical in nature.

A cursory reading of some leaked state department cables or any analysis of how statecraft works shows that business and government work together to pressure and negotiate over things which affect multinational companies.

mstaoru4• 9 years ago

When you apply for ICP beian license at Aliyun (Alibaba's cloud), you either choose "I use Aliyun" and give them the server ID, or you choose "I use another server" and two additional fields appear: your server log in, your server password.

You need ICP license if you want to integrate any kind of service. Wechat, Alipay, other payment systems, SMS notifications etc, everything needs the ICP.

I guess AWS China also had to give up access to all servers to govt. And given the govt "professionalism" (check the China's Ministry of Information website), that's not the kind of access I'd like to give away.

jonmaim2• 9 years ago

If you are ready for that, is it possible for a foreign company to obtain an ICP license and thus operate in China?

mstaoru4• 9 years ago

AFAIK it is possible now to get the ICP, but to integrate Wechat / Alipay or any other meaningful service you need a Chinese legal entity. A foreign company can register WFOE which is a Wholly Foreign Owned Enterprise, you do not need any Chinese partners or anything, but might be costly to set up and in paid-up capital depending on the industry. E.g. for a fashion brand I know of, they asked to have ¥10 million ($1.5 million) to be deposited within 1 year.

dheera• 9 years ago

What password? SSH password? What if you use SSH keys? None of my AWS instances have passwords and even in the days when I had EC2 instances in Beijing a couple years ago there were no passwords to them. (I wasn't hosting a public-facing service so no ICP was necessary. But still, any non-idiotic sysadmin won't be having password authentication to all their servers.)

mstaoru4• 9 years ago

Then you don't get the license. I have an app built on top of Zappa, using Lambda + API Gateway, I don't even have an IP address! :)

Anyway, for NOW, the possible workaround, as I've heard, shall we say, is to use a temporary server, get the ICP and then change your DNS to point to the real server. For NOW they don't track it, but you need to re-apply every 12-24 months (rinse & repeat). However, it gives them every ground to shut your service down without any warning.

teknologist3• 9 years ago

Usually not having the ICP also means your site is dog slow and prone to being blocked at any moment.

Of course if your site is actually needed enough this rule kind of gets ignored. See: GitHub. They probably don't have an ICP license or plans to get one and yet it works really well in China (not even joking)

zitterbewegung• 9 years ago

I remember Github has been blocked in the past . See https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_of_GitHub#China

usaphp5• 9 years ago

So again, companies are fighting and vocal about "freedom", equality, lgbt rights etc only when it's convinient for them, as soon as they see that it might make them lose money - they will do whatever it takes to keep that cash flowing. Look at Tim Cook, how vocal he was in US with his LGBT support and anti-Trump position and other topics, but as soon as he sees that he can lose cash from China he does almost the same thing as what he is fighting against in US. How are these companies leaders different from those people in China who sit at a top of food chain and do same things because they worry about losing money after losing control...

blantonl• 9 years ago

Tim Cook runs a multi-national corporation. His obligation is to a shareholders as CEO. It is a simple as that.

A lot of us don’t agree with these policy decisions by these companies, but there they are.

ams61102• 9 years ago

Fine. Tim Cook loses all his SJW cred then, for whatever that's worth.

vacri2• 9 years ago

It's a myth that companies are legally required to maximise profit.

usaphp5• 9 years ago

Then he should not yell left and right how he is fighting for freedom and human rights, just so he can win some "points" from people...It's always easy to make it look like you are fighting against something bad when your ass is safe and warm...

nubbins• 9 years ago

There can be some ethical issues orthogonal to profit and loss considerations though. Now would shareholders be able to sue Cook for losing money by fighting the Chinese government, I have no idea, but its not quite as simple as that, that's letting them off the hook too easily in my opinion.

geofft• 9 years ago

Whatever the truth of fiduciary duty may be, it is definitely not any company's fiduciary duty under American law to expand to China and serve customers there, even if it would make investors more money.

lostmsu8• 9 years ago

How is shareholder's interest any different from corrupted government interest? You either support freedom of information, or you do not.

mrep• 9 years ago

Do you suggest all companies boycott China then cause there is no other way to break into the market?

usaphp5• 9 years ago

I just suggest them not to proclaim then that they are "proud" fighters for human rights and freedom...

hasenj• 9 years ago

There's no reason to believe these are anything but PR stunts.

Steko3• 9 years ago

he does almost the same thing as what he is fighting against in US

That's baloney, they are not remotely the same thing.

usaphp5• 9 years ago

"As expected, Apple CEO Tim Cook accepted the Free Expression Award at the Newseum in Washington D.C. tonight. At the event, Cook was presented the award and made brief comments on what it means to him and Apple, as well as touching on the importance of companies taking a stance…" [1]

[1] https://9to5mac.com/2017/04/18/tim-cook-free-expression-awar...

vacri2• 9 years ago

Apple's issue isn't just about 'losing money'. Their supply and manufacturing chain is in China. They have their throat laid bare on this one, and if they stood on principle, their throat would be cut in short order.

CountSessine4• 9 years ago

that he can lose cash from China he does almost the same thing as what he is fighting against in US

I'm kind of wondering how you think its possible to run a large company while 'losing cash' because your supply chain is suddenly unavailable? Or because your competitors have a lower cost structure than you do?

Do you know what American consumers will do if Tim Cook doesn't feed them the bullshit about how it's realistic to impose American values on their Chinese partners? American consumers will go buy a f'ing Samsung. Samsung's ethical record is horrifying and truly shameful - far worse than anything Apple has ever done or consented to - but American ignorance of and indifference to other cultures spares Samsung the same burden that Apple and Tim Cook bear. Cook needs to feed his customers the bullshit; Samsung, Xiaomi, Huawei etc don't.

abiox6• 9 years ago

as soon as he sees that he can lose cash from China

...or the company being severely damaged by asset seizures, manufacturing capabilities decimated, and people going to prison for flagrantly engaging in illegal activities.

wyager4• 9 years ago

I'm glad everyone is so anti-censorship in this thread! Should tech companies also ignore censorship at the hands of European governments or Canada via "right to be forgotten" legislation? I seem to recall people on this site saying that it would be wrong for tech companies to resist the government in those cases. At least China isn't attempting to force censorship in other countries, unlike the Canadian government.

mtgx2• 9 years ago

Google is fighting the Canadian court right now.

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/07/google-sues-in-u...

wyager4• 9 years ago

Good, but my point was that people on HN were generally in support of Canadian censorship.

am19885• 9 years ago

That "forced censorship" isn't about a right to be forgotten or any reasonable definition of freedom of expression. It's about a company violating IP rights.

The US government puts the same pressure on Google. Worse actually, because the DCMA expects it to be done without a court order (which has lead to rampant abuse on sites like youtube).

wyager4• 9 years ago

Of course, I should have figured that our censorship was for good reasons, but not Chinese censorship. After all, copyright interests are clearly worth censoring for, but whatever excuse the Chinese government used (State interests?) aren't.

notliketherest• 9 years ago

Like dominos they bow before their God of money.

shmerl• 9 years ago

I'm not surprised.

illuminati1911• 9 years ago

To all these "you either support freedom of information or you dont" commenters:

If life was only so simple.

No sane CEO would try to fight against Chinese government risking their access to the market.

Even if the goal for the company is freedom of information, pissing of Chinese government, risking the safety of the company employees in China and getting smoked out by the shareholders is not gonna help anyone. It's much better to initially comply with their rules, gain their trust and try to change things in the long run. Might never work but still better than this "in or out" idiotism which will never work.

ariwilson• 9 years ago

Disagree. In my opinion, American/other foreign tech companies have gotten a raw deal in China, with constant technology theft and hindered access to the domestic market, in addition to the usual suppression of dissent/free speech. I haven't seen any signs that this has been changing for the better, so why should American tech companies engage in China?

WithHighProb2• 9 years ago

One possible reason is they want to keep earning report looking good (or maintain a so-called "fast growth" because the bubble is too big. Believe it or not, China has everything to fill your tech bubble despite some restrictions.

curiousgal• 9 years ago

How is this different from companies abiding to a country's tax laws for example. If you want to do business in a country, you stick to its rules. China's rules call for censorship so companies must comply or leave. A bit too simplistic but that's how I see it.

robrenaud• 9 years ago

Perhaps I am just a jaded westerner, but the ability to freely spread ideas counter to the ruling government is a fundamental right.

yoz-y• 9 years ago

It is sad that Amazon does concessions for China while being blatantly hidered by them. For example amazonaws links are blocked by WeChat due to "This page has been reported multiple times as it rewards users for sharing on social network or following a brand." (This particular link was a direct link to a bus ticket in PDF format).

The explanation is especially shaky since the whole point of wechat is to share stuff and follow brands...

chj• 9 years ago

I don't understand the point of this report. Any server in China always subjects to GFW's censorship power. Or does it mean that a Chinese customer of Amazon Web Service can not rent a cloud server abroad for VPN purpose?

patkai• 9 years ago

Amazon is too big, they can't afford to act otherwise. We should all build medium size, privately owned companies and at least try to have a spine. The background of the problem is nicely highlighted in DHH's blog post "Enough".

bantunes• 9 years ago

Cash rules everything around me.

justadeveloper22• 9 years ago

Sad the world we live in. We need the world to reach for Western standards of openness, freedom, and dignity and put people before profits. Instead, I see us altering our way of life to the least common denominator of state coercion.

Joining Apple, Amazon’s China Cloud Service Bows to Censors

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