Google Panders in the Land of Pandas.
This front-page New York Times story provides an interesting contrast with the last story I mentioned.
Google is moving into China, less its e-mail and blog services. It’s search engine will be designed to be heavily censored, in keeping with China’s policy of oppressing the living hell out of its citizens. This is a change from the past, when China had to do the censoring itself. Here’s a bit of Google’s justification:
“Google is mindful that governments around the world impose restriction on access to information,” a senior executive wrote, responding to questions. “In order to operate from China, we have removed some content from the search results available on Google.cn, in response to local law, regulation or policy. While removing search results is inconsistent with Google’s mission, providing no information (or a heavily degraded user experience that amounts to no information) is more inconsistent with our mission.”
The Chinese government has been particularly strict in recent years about filtering antigovernment news and opinion pieces from the Web and blocking Web sites or blogs that question governmental authority.
The government also has employed a variety of techniques to control what appears on the Web – temporarily blocking sites, redirecting viewers to government-controlled sites and even shutting sites altogether. Government officials have even been able to block references to specific words, like Tibet, Falun Gong and Tiananmen Square.
Huh. So Google is fighting the US government over a fairly innocuous request for one week’s worth of information, yet it’s rolled over like a tame puppy for the Chinese government just to get its hands on a chunk of the big Chinese internet market.
Seems to me like Google is letting us know just how much its principles are worth. I don’t have a problem with any company making money, even a huge whopping ton of money. I’m a capitalist. More power to Google for making truckloads of cash. I do, however, have a problem with rank hypocrisy and climbing into bed with tyrants.
It strikes me as slightly ironic that the company’s informal motto is “Don’t be evil”. Apparently “Whore Yourself Out for Evil” works for them, too.
UPDATE: Google’s co-founder Sergey Brin addressed the subject today at the World Economic Forum in Davos. His answer basically boils down to, “Well, it was being censored anyhow and, hey, isn’t some information better than no information. Hmmm? Hmmm?”.
Don’t believe me? Here are a couple quotes:
“I didn’t think I would come to this conclusion — but eventually I came to the conclusion that more information is better, even if it is not as full as we would like to see,” Brin told Reuters in an interview in Switzerland.
…
“The practical matter is that over the last couple of years Google in China was censored — not by us but by the government, via the ‘Great Firewall,”‘ said Brin. “It’s not something I enjoy but I think it was a reasonable decision.”
So there you go. They’re not doing anything the government wasn’t already doing.
I don’t even think Brin realizes that he’s now the paid stooge of the Chinese government. They just outsourced part of their repression of free expression machine to him and he’s cool with that.
But, hey, who are we to cast the repression stone? More Brin.
“France and Germany require censorship for Nazi sites, and the U.S. requires censorship based on the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DCMA). These various countries also have laws on child pornography,” he said.
Yeah! You guys censor too! Neener, neener, neener! What vapid moral equivalence.
I wonder if his words will be any comfort to the hundreds or thousands of people tossed into Chinese prisons or sent to work camps for a couple decades because they were snared by the net Brin built to catch them. This is beyond reprehensible. He’s not just taking a little dirty money from China. He’s actively helping the Chinese government crush the throats of a couple hundred million people. He’s complicit with tyranny and pure evil. I don’t imagine how his company’s move can be seen any other way.
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Category: The World At Large
