“While technologically and financially you are giants, morally you are pygmies.”

Suzanne Nossel writes at Foreign Policy an article entitled,

Google Is Handing the Future of the Internet to China.
The company has been quietly collaborating with the Chinese government on a new, censored search engine—and abandoning its own ideals in the process.

...But amid all the moral ambiguity and uncharted terrain of running an internet platform that controls vast swaths of global discourse and reaps commensurate revenues, some dilemmas are more straightforward than others. That’s why word of Google’s plans to substantially expand its currently minimal role in the Chinese market—through the potential launch of a censored search engine code-named Dragonfly—has provoked such uproar.

...In a notorious 2007 incident, it was revealed that Yahoo had turned over private information about two journalists at the request of Chinese authorities, resulting in 10-year prison sentences for the men and a global uproar at the spectacle of a U.S. company betraying its users to an authoritarian regime. The company settled a lawsuit with the families of the two men, established a $17 million fund to support Chinese dissidents, and faced a congressional investigation in which Rep. Tom Lantos infamously chided, “While technologically and financially you are giants, morally you are pygmies.”

Read more here.