Search Companies Questioned About Chinese Policy

Romerican writes "The U.S. Government is questioning Google in relation to corporate behavior under anti-bribery laws. The government is also questioning Yahoo, Microsoft and Cisco about their dealings with the Chinese government. Where do Slashdotters see this going?" From the Red Herring article: "There is precedent for the U.S. government establishing laws governing the conduct of U.S. companies abroad. During 1977 the U.S. government enacted the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA), which was substantially revised during 1988. The provisions of the FCPA prohibit the bribery of foreign government officials by U.S. citizens and prescribe accounting and record-keeping practices. Opponents of the law said it would severely restrict the ability of U.S. companies to compete in many countries where bribery was part of the commercial fabric." ats-tech wrote to give us the link to Google's response to these events, via the Googleblog.

Comments

Nothing New for Google

[MarkPNeyer]

Schmidt and Brin both fly around in a personal Jet which uses an absurd amount of fuel. They've justified this by saying that they encourage their employees to buy hybrid cars, and so on the whole they're making a net decrease in fuel consumption. They make the same kind of argument with respect to their dealings China hear - "On the whole, we're doing more to benefit the chinese people than by just leaving them with the crappy system that was in place."

The problem with google's line of ethical reasoning has to do with their predictive capabilities. How in hell do you evaluate which is better? The only widely recognized framework whereby decisions as to what is best for a large number of people can be made is a democratic election/governmental process. By entering the chinese market and agreeing to help the chinese government hide its hideous record, google is saying that they know what's best for the chinese people. Anyone who gets pissed off about right-wingers forcing their religion down other people's throats ought to be equally mad about this, becuase it's the same situation - one group of people deciding they know what's best for others.