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Google Steps Up Fight for the China Market
gaanagaa writes "News Sources are reporting that web services leader Google Inc. has won a license to operate in China and has bought a Web address as it battles Yahoo Inc. in the world's second-largest Internet market.
The U.S. Web services giant, which makes its money from searches, advertising and other services, is hiring staff with the aim of opening an office in the country this year, according to several sources within or close to the company.
A person familiar with the matter told Reuters the company was planning to open an office by the end of this year, most likely in Shanghai, and was building up a country team to target corporate customers for advertising sales."
Given China's record so far on internet censorship, will Google have to cooperate with the Chinese government, even as it operates physically within China and targets Chinese citizens, on what can and can't be indexed and offered for search to Chinese citizens?
Will Google's presence in China hasten the free flow of information, or end up encouraging the Chinese government to reactively restrict even more?
There's no question it's a lucrative market financially. The question is how much companies - even the "Don't be evil"-Google - will capitulate to the government's demands for censorship to guarantee a share of the spoils.
Yahoo's been Shanghai'd!
If Google wants to stay in business, this is exactly the kind of a thing a shareholder would expect from their management. Not entering a market that comprises one quarter of the world would be fatal.
Hopefully, now you see how aggressive a company must become once it goes public.
By the way, did you know that Sergey Brin no longer owns any shares in Google?
I guess it's true -- using Linux does lead to communism.
With Google moving quite rapidly into a "personalized" model, where your searches, email, search history, etc is all tied to a single account, tracking down people based on their Google activity shouldn't be too difficult.
As a side note, this is what happens (delete is quite a misnomer IMHO) when you choose to "delete" your search information:
4. What happens when I pause the service, remove items, or delete the My Search History service?
You can choose to stop storing your searches in My Search History either temporarily or permanently, or remove items, as described in My Search History Help. However, as is common practice in the industry, Google maintains a separate logs system for auditing purposes and to help us improve the quality of our services for users. For example, we use this information to audit our ads systems, understand which features are most popular to users, improve the quality of our search results, and help us combat vulnerabilities such as denial of service attacks.
An Indian-American Hindu committed to non-violent thought/speech/action alarmed by the global explosion of radical Islam
I don't understand why it's evil for google to have to put some censorship required by the Chinese government. Is filtering content itself evil? Hard to say. Is filtering porn evil? (which IS what Chinese government does) Is entering Chinese market and cooperating with Chinese government evil? Wow, that's gone too far for me to comment. So, what is evil, exactly?
So Google moves into a new market. A restricted market. Nothing wrong with that. It's one of the fastest-growing markets in the world right now. If they don't move into it, they'd be crazy. So they have to filter some content. All markets are restricted in some way. Doesn't make them evil to follow the rules.
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Freedom starts with you.
To confirm you're not a script, please piss in my ear.
You know, I'm a first generation Chinese immigrant who's been living in the States for most of my life now (got my US citizenship just last year), and the attitudes most Americans (can I assume parent thread is American?) have towards China is still quite the paradox to me.
/. for tech news (computer science major and all that), but steer clear of the political threads. Unfortunately I stumbled into this one.
On one hand, I can't help but admire the constant moralizing and ideological rigidity that Americans are so fond of. On the other hand, it shocks me that a people who consider themselves so enlightened can still be so... ignorant. Slashdot especially is pretty solid breeding ground for the militantly libertarian sort. I usually like reading
Let me dissect your self-righteous ramble line by line.
"...Great Leap Forward resulted in the deaths of some 30-60 million of your countrymen..."
Please, I find it insulting that you speak to the Chinese people as if we're all blind children. If you were even REMOTELY aware of Chinese history, you'll know that from 1976-1978 the CCP openly criticized Mao as part of the reform process. My family was part of the pre-1949 landowning class, and they suffered a GREAT deal from Mao's policies. The abuses of the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution are open grounds for public discussion. Chinese people are QUITE aware of their own history, thank you very much.
"...China's invasion of Tibet..."
Yes we are quite aware of that history as well. We are also quite aware of the fact that from 1950 through the late 1960's, the CIA trained several thousand guerrilla operatives in Tibet to combat the PLA. What perplexes me is how exactly is it that you feel you are reaching out to COMMON CHINESE PEOPLE by bringing up Tibet? I fully acknowledge that the 1950 invasion was probably morally indefensible. But if you seem to tie everything evil about China to 'them damn commies,' you are dead fucking wrong. Chinese nationalism is alive and well, with or without the CCP. If anything, the CCP is REIGNING IN grassroots nationalism. If the Chinese were to decide by popular concensus their policy towards say, Taiwan or Tibet, believe me, the attitude would be considerably more hostile than the current CCP policy.
"...Falun Gong..."
Yeah yeah I get it. Freedom of religion blah blah blah. Let's put it this way: Chinese people don't give a fuck. Now that would of course be a gross over-simplification, and I will elaborate on that statement even though simpletons like you are unable to achieve any level of nuance in your soapboxing. Religion and spirituality in China has been in flux for most of the 20th century. For those acquainted in Chinese history, China has never had a 'religion' per se. Confucianism and ancestor worship was a sort of philosophical/spiritual hybrid belief system, alien to the West, that China lived with until the 20th century. Since the old belief system was discredited by imperialism and the collapse of the Qing dynasty, Communism essentially took its place as a pseudo-religion of sorts. After communism was discredited in the post-Mao reforms, China was essentially at a loss to find a satisfying belief system. All sorts of cults, Falun Gong being the biggest, grew out of a vacuum. The VAST majority of Chinese however, are rather more devoted to making a living, and secular nationalism is a FAR bigger phenomenon than Falun Gong. The bottom line is that this is a marginal issue to most Chinese.
"...rather execute people rather than let them practice it..."
I have no idea where you've been getting your information buddy. There hasn't been large scale political executions in China since Tiananmen. Executions are for economic and violent crimes (corruption, smuggling, drugs, and homicide - several high-level provincial officials have been sent to the gallows). With crime rising along with increasing openness and economic instability, the death penalty is becoming MORE popular in China,
Not flamebait at all -- but I think you're missing out by casting the debate as legitimate Chinese fear of chaos vs. American ignorance, rather than simply distinguishing between two arguments.
What you're overlooking is the cost of the status quo -- the fact that the progressive misalignment of economic and political power can also cause instability. The value of free expression in China is not that they will suddenly decide to pull out of Tibet, but that they will develop the kind of political discourse needed to sustain progress. I think if you reread your own posts, you will see that the kind of social pressures needed to maintain a social consensus in the face of free content flows are already there -- "from my Chinese perspective...our Chinese concern for stability...[Chinese care about economic development, not Falun Gong]", etc. So in pointing out the concerns driving the need for censorship, you unwittingly point out why censorship is unnecessary.
Beyond that, you say, "wait until we're middle class and urbanized," but argue earlier that CCP abuses in the countryside are preventing this sort of thing from happening. This is precisely the kind of skew that poor information flows enable. And for as long as they're enabling it, you're going to be saying, "wait until we're all middle class and urbanized...".
So again, from my perspective, so have provided an illustration of a problem deepened and worsened by lack of open political discourse -- censorship may buy you time, but it won't make anybody *use* that time to solve the problems.
In sum, I think your attitudes towards fear of social chaos are reflected widely enough in Chinese society that while open content may shift the terms of the debate, nobody wants to ruin a good thing, economically. Further, I think the short-term expediency of censorship, by stunting political consensus-building on a broader array of issues, fuels precisely the kind of tensions you seem to fear most.
Kill, Tux, kill!