If Google had the guts to pull out of China, why not threaten to pull out of US?

8 points by kenips 14 years ago | 5 comments

A lot of media have compared SOPA to the Great Firewall of China. While they are quite different in my opinion (and not the point of this post), I wonder why Google doesn't threaten to pull out of US because of SOPA. Google could then ignore this non-sense and find the "Hong Kong" of United States (maybe Canada?), and recreate the free web there.

Maybe we can get enough sites behind this to send a message to Congress.

keeperofdakeys 14 years ago |

Google, as a company, is based in the US. Nearly all their man-power is there, and a lot (don't know about majority) of their servers. As a company, it is really impossible to stop being in the US.

Google were capable of moving out of China as they weren't very invested there and it didn't upset there investors.

HardyLeung 14 years ago |

If they do that, the stock price of Google will plunge, and the CEO and directors of Google will be sued to oblivion. The vacuum created by a Google pullout will be happily filled by other tech companies (Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, Facebook) who, with less suicidal impulse, would be more than thrilled with such opportunities, even doing so with a straight face of "doing what's the best for our people". What a huge price to pay for "sending a message to Congress"...

gcb 14 years ago | |

the how is irrelevant for this tasty speculation.

they may move only hosting outside and refuse access from the US, if not from their US corporate network.

IMHO, the more interesting thing to think about is the resulting wake up call. would be nice to have to use underground proxies to be able to access free services hosted at some place like Sweden. Would at least not give a false sense of political freedom if SOPA passes as is.

cmelbye 14 years ago |

That would be suicidal...

leeHS 14 years ago |

how?