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Bill Gates Defends Google's Censorship In China
worb writes "At the World Economic Forum today, Bill Gates defended Google's actions in China and told delegates that the internet 'is contributing to Chinese political engagement' as 'access to the outside world is preventing more censorship'. There was no reason for technology companies not to do business in China, he argued."
...you so you decide to go over there and see if he needs a hand with his new deck. Oh, and you also give him a nice new baseball bat that he says he needs for, uh, batting practice. After all, you have a far better chance of reforming him by rewarding him, right?
---Technology will liberate us if it doesn't enslave us first.
I work in a country where pornography is illegal, so whenever I set up a network I have to install a content filter as due diligence. Personally, I consider abuse of office resources to be a human resource issue, and I make it very clear to management that no filtering technology I can install will obviate the need for a clear Acceptable Use Policy and careful monitoring by staff and management.
I'm not entirely comfortable about blocking content on the Internet, as it's failure prone and IMO removes the responsibility from where I believe it should lie - squarely on the shoulders of the individual members of the organisation. I also find that the local attitude toward the human body extremely unhealthy and socially repressive. But because failure on my part to actively uphold the law of the land could result in my deportation and, more importantly, could harm the development organisation for whom I work, I hold my nose and install the filter anyway.
I still believe that the work I'm doing - bringing the Internet to places where it has never existed before - has more advantages than drawbacks. That's why I'm willing to compromise my principles and to go ahead with this.
That said, I am not working for the local government. Quite the contrary; I work for civil society organisations who spend a great deal of their time and energy keeping the government responsive to the needs of the people. I feel quite ambivalent about companies like Microsoft, Yahoo! and Google, who are in effect doing the government's work for it.
Gates' logic seems to run as follows:
I've tried to weigh the kind of compromises I'm willing to make in the course of trying to benefit society in the country where I work against the purported benefit that accrues to the people of China as a result of the presence of these tech corporations, and for reasons that I can't express very well, I still feel that avarice is leading Gates and co. to make rationalisations.
Anyway, this post is not really trying to prescribe so much as to suggest that the moral and ethical ground is not nearly as clear on either side as we might like. I emphatically disagree with the argument that corporations are amoral and should act only for profit, but at the same time, I have little patience for those who allow Platonic ideals to control their real world behaviour.
Crumb's Corollary: Never bring a knife to a bun fight.
I've been comparing some of the differences between the chinese version and the US one.
.cn: "Taiwanese Independence". Note that the Independence Party is completly gone from the results. Guess they are subversive.
Take a look at the Google US search for "Tiawanese Independence. Note that the first result is the Tiawanese Independence Party, and #2 describes how Bush Opposes it.
Now, let's take a look at the french site, to see if the results are similar - "Taiwanese Independence". Very similar results.
Let's try this on
Far more insidious than actually banning certain searches is manipulating the results themselves to tout the party line. Leave a few fringe sites up, so you don't appear to completly control things, but remove any site you consider to truly be a threat. After all, they are doubleplus ungood.
Starting on the 5th page of google.cn, some of the famous pictures start to trickle in.
Bury me in mashed potatoes.
>Google says they're going to label redacted data as such.
e n%20square
r e
(Note: I stole the following example)
Look at this;
http://images.google.cn/images?hl=zh-CN&q=tiananm
now look at this;
http://images.google.ca/images?q=tiananmen%20squa
Now would you know that "due to local laws some search results were excluded" that this was the difference?
>I simply can't fathom why you'd think the Chinese people are so gullible.
They are not stupid; the people are not getting the information they need. You can't ask for something you don't know exists.
For an example;
http://www.asianresearch.org/articles/1722.html
The surprise isn't how often we make bad choices; the surprise is how seldom they defeat us.
Don't want to pay your electric company? Invest in solar panels, a diesel or lp gas generator, thermocouples or whatever it takes.
I escape pretty much literally thousands of tv ads every day - I don't watch stations that air commercials.
You, by not erecting off grid energy sources for yourself and watching tv every day are contributing to that pollution that so bothers you. So turn off the bloody tv and save that energy. Use that time you used to waste being a couch potato lobbying your representatives.
You are addicted to a culture you despise and blaming the culture for reflecting the values you support. That's not culture's problem, and culture cannot fix itself.