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Why Google in China Makes Sense
ctd writes "The BBC is carrying an interesting article about the positive outcomes from Google's censorship of its China site." From the article: "Millions of people may now be turning away from Google in disgust, but I've just reinstated them as the default search for my Firefox toolbar, because I think it should be supported for its brave decision. Even if the primary motivation for going into China is that it makes commercial sense for the company - as indeed it must do, since US law is quite harsh on boards that take actions which could damage shareholder value - it also makes political sense. "
They made a big thing about the filtering, but when I went on google's china site and seached for tianamen square the first result i got was about the masacre and the second was from amnesty's web page... it doesn't look like they are actually filtering anything
Also, they mentioned that google would say when it actually filtered something out, which lets people know they are doing it, witholding rights is like growing mushrooms, they both grow best in the dark
*''I can't believe it's not a hyperlink.''
This bit of stupidity is a staple of posters here already -- it's not like you need to link to another continent for it.
US law requires boards to operate in shareholders' interest in a broad sense, i.e. that they're not supposed to pillage the company to enrich themselves. It doesn't mean that they're required to take every short-term opportunity to grab another dollar. (How do you think they make charitable donations or provide sponsorships?)
There is zero possibility that an any legal case could be made against the Google board if they had declined to operate in China under these restrictions.
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
How on earth is starbucks socially responsible?
They pay below a living wage value for coffee beans and because of their size they can bully the suppliers into following along (think WalMart). The only reason they serve free trade coffee at some stores (Corp stores only) is because of a lawsuit they lost. Even at that you have to request the free trade coffee if it isn't on the one day a month they serve it all day.
The reason shareholder value went up is that they mitigated the lawsuit losses by getting the settlement to be one day a month or on request, and only corp stores. Thus the franchise stores can buy the cheaper coffee (from Starbucks corp.) and not offer the fair trade value coffee. Since Starbucks continues to profit from the franchise coffee sales it doesn't matter that the corp stores (which IIRC number less than franchise outlets) make less money.
1. screw the suppliers of your raw material in 3rd world countries
2. profit
3. get caught
4. mitigate lawsuit and spin off franchises immune from suit settlement
5. profit again!
-nB
whois gawk date unzip strip find touch finger mount join nice man top fsck grep eject more yes exit umount sleep dump
The bottom of the page still says:
"In response to a complaint we received under the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act, we have removed 1 result(s) from this page. If you wish, you may read the DMCA complaint that caused the removal(s) at ChillingEffects.org."
This leads me to believe there is still 1 missing result from that search, which I am not allowed to see, because of a law (DMCA) that my government has, even if it was a person or corporation which abused this law in this particular case, and not the government directly asking Google to remove the link.
Morphing Software
a way past censorship of individual domains, urls, or page content is to encode content using non-censored internet material. this would work like private public key encryption. client browser has a plug-in that acts as a public key to decode content. for example, google uncensored search results could be used as variables in encoding. the client would then use reassemble the encoded material using the public key. thus random, innocuous, uncensored internet content that would contain the encoded message. this could never be censored unless the entire intenet were blocked.
There are search engines besides Google. It's not like Google's presence in China is "essential" to getting any information.
-- "I never gave these stories much credence." - HAL 9000
Bullshit.
.cn search for Falun Gong
I quick search on google.cn for "Falun Gong" will show the same censored view you get from any other search engine. No obvious indication of what is missed from a non-censored search.
Google
I was curious so I did a search for "falun gong" on www.google.cn and did another search on www.google.com, the differences in the results really struck me, the results on .cn came back as very negative towards Falun Gong, and the results on .com were mixed. It could be argued that that a censored search engine is a Propaganda Tool.
Progress is slow, rapid changes have a good chance of leading to horrid outcomes. Democracy doesn't do much unless the people know what a democracy is (not because someone shoved it down their throats but because they understand what it is and more importantly why it is), so your point is worthless.
Also China cannot really go back anymore and cannot restrict things much more than it already does, they've let the cat out of the bag economically and politically a while ago. It's like a house of cards; you can't pull out a card from the center and expect everything to stand as before (such as their ever global economy). China seems to be on the road to democracy, again in a slow and stable manner.
And especially when Google is letting people know they are being censored by their goverment...
Any sect, cult, or religion will legislate its creed into law if it acquires the political power to do so.
Instead, try the search "tiananmen square protest 1989" on www.google.cn and see the #1 hit. Certainly that isn't being caught or censored. Don't know if the results differ inside China, although I suspect they might since I have heard the rumor they have firewalls and routers that sniff out terms they don't like. However that wouldn't necessarily be Google's fault.
Since images are hard to filter for content, it makes sense that the Chinese government is trying to limit results to sites they control. What will be more interesting is what happens when they start using Google themselves and can theoretically a.) remove or impose penalties on those sites like the link I posted b.) ask Google to be more restrictive.
I would have preferred Google not give in, but the results could nonetheless be interesting.