China, Google, and Cooperation with Evil

This post, at the Volokh Conspiracy -- about internet companies' complicity in China's . . . well, evil policies, is well worth a read:

[T]here appears to be no way to be an ethical Internet company in China today, just as there was no way to be an ethical supplier of spy equipment to the USSR or Nazi Germany. Corporations are generally supposed to maximize their profits, but there is a point at which a particular form of profit maximization becomes unethical. It's ethical for companies to make barbed wire, but it's not ethical for the company to sell barbed wire to a regime which the company knows will use the barbed wire to build concentration camps.

The American Internet companies which do business in China are assisting the creation of the world's most sophisticated architecture of repression. No company should make profits at such a terrible cost to human rights. After American companies left, the Chinese tyrants would undoubtedly find other, inferior, foreign companies to provide Internet services and assist with the suppression of liberty. It would be better, though, if China's architecture of repression were built by inferior, less efficient companies, rather than by the best minds of the world's best computer companies.

Relatedly, if you have not read A. Solzhenitsyn's "The First Circle," you should.

Rick