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Google Stands Ground on Google.cn
nmccart writes "Google gave testimony on Friday to the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on International Relations. They discussed their decision to build google.cn in China. Elliot Schrage, the vice president for global communications and public affairs at Google describes how these China-based servers fit in to Google's mantra of 'Don't be evil.' Google hopes to use this as an opportunity to help bring global censorship into the spotlight of American politics. Will it work?"
Although this may be an unpopular viewpoint here - Google did what they had to do. However they did it reluctantly. As they pointed out they have to follow the laws of the country they're in. Regarding censorship - there are ways around the GFC and people benefit from even the censored version of Google compared to nothing at all.
Video Game cheats, hints a
http://images.google.com/images?hl=en&c2coff=1&q=t iananmen&spell=1&sa=N&tab=wi
e n&btnG=Google+%E6%90%9C%E7%B4%A2&sa=N&tab=wi
http://images.google.cn/images?hl=zh-CN&q=tiananm
...because asusming that Google's statement is true, there are too many others with their own agendas who will twist whatever's said to bolster their own positions.
While I don't like Google's actions in China, they're not nearly as reprehensible as Cisco Systems (equipping and training Chinese Police to seek out those who have spoken against the Government using the routers to prosecute) and Yahoo (turning over contact information of those who were specifically targeted), so Google really is a more minor player here than the others anyway.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
Google describes how these China-based servers fit in to Google's mantra of 'Don't be evil.' Google hopes to use this as an opportunity to help bring global censorship into the spotlight of American politics.
Being evil fits into the idea of "Don't be Evil" because by being evil we are showing the evil of being evil, therefor getting people to talk about evil critically, which is Good.
Very noble of them!
In all honesty, I think this is overblown. Congress should examine its own dealings with China first.... clinging to this cold war ideal that isolating a population will cause it to stop supporting its government has been shown to be false (Cuba anyone). Only buy engaging a population, and exposing them to more of American culture can we cause change.
Put another way, missiles didn't win the Cold War, Bluejeans did.
In other words, they know that they have completely sold out their basic values. The rest is just pages of rationalization.
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
The logical flaw there is question-begging. The point is, they get to choose the countries they're in, and China need not be one of them.
It's really an age-old question: do you shun the evildoers so that they don't influence you, or do you go out and mingle with the evildoers so that you can be a positive influence?
Google appears to be saying that since content filters are not as good as their search engiine, they can be a more positive influence on the culture in China than cooperating with the Chinese harms them.
And there's money there.
sigs, as if you care.
Google, in the interest of profit, has bent to China's demands. Maybe they aren't the only ones "complying with local laws", however they have the highest profile these days.
I think what is drawing the most attention is the fact that their motto, which touts corporate responsibility, is taking a back seat to profits. If you are going to paint yourself as the good guys then you should put that responsibilty ahead of profits. Otherwise just change your motto to -- "Out for a buck like everyone else."
And say they are looking to congress for moral guidance? What kind of a cheap cop out is that?
So how is censorship going to encourage a freer place ? Misinformation is often more effective than disinformation, just like spies and assasins are more effective than soliders on a fort. The effect this will have is to prevent the majority from actually complaining, leaving the vocal minority of civil rights protestors looking like whiny children.
Didn't that mean give in to china or cuba or whatever country just to gain a toehold in that country.
As much as I'd like to believe all the moral claptrap in this release, I think the bottom line is clearly stated in the article as follows - The backdrop to Google's decision to launch Google.cn is the explosive growth of the Internet in China. and Google wants in. Yahoo has already made all the connections nearly half a year ago.To summarize - there's money in China and google.cn is going to be there too.
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum videtur
If Congress wants a revolution in China, great. I don't see why the hell they expect Google to fight their wars for them, though. I pay lots of tax money to fund the CIA so that *they* can start revolutions in various places.
A lot of people were pretty sure at one point that communism was a pretty enlightened and excellent idea. You can be damned sure that if the USSR started putting pressure on any organizations that they had influence over to spew communist ideology in the US, that people and government in the US would be pissy about it, and it would be considered "evil" by the people in the US.
Ultimately, revolutions come from within. If you don't have lots of discontented people, you aren't going to have an uprising. Maybe you can be the one to touch flame to tinder and accelerate things by a couple of years, but you can't build a revolution from nothing (but you can sure as hell antagonize people by trying). The folks in China clearly are not unhappy enough at the moment with the censorship going on to want to do something about it. All Google is doing is not trying to fight the social norms in China.
If Congress wants to run psyops, they can use the system that is already being paid for by my tax dollars -- Voice of America. As you can see in the table on WP, China is now the leading target of US propaganda. The end of the Cold War kind of terminated our interest in poking the Soviet Union.
China is a competitive market, and one in which Google is not dominant. If you try to force Google to leverage their market influence in the hopes of pushing your own culture on someone else, you're just going to kill Google in that market. That's a really stupid idea if you're trying to export services like Google.
Any program relying on (nontrivial) preemptive multithreading will be buggy.
I'd agree that Google's actions were pure evil, except for this one point:
"Disclosure to users -- We will give notification to Chinese users whenever search results have been removed."
This has the potential to be nicely subversive. Constantly reminding the users that their government is censoring information is, at least, a mitigation of the evil.
That's the most lopsided biased synopsis I've seen in a while. The most obvious omissions are:
+ Chinese Language Google.com continues to be available in China, unfiltered by Google.
+ Chinese ISPs do filter this and make it painful to use, but that is definitely beyond Google's control.
+ Offering Google.cn only increases information availability and Google clearly marks when results are censored.
If doing business with China is truly evil, then let's hear about your personal pledge to boycott Chinese goods, electronics, clothing. Or is hypocrisy only a problem for others?
"But they said they won't be evil." Give me a break. If doing business with China is evil (and it's not unreasonable to take that stance, if you're consistent), I'd much rather have a company that _tries_ to do the right thing and succeeds 90% of the time than one that never tries at all.
All you folks that complain about google offering this service need to have your head examined.
Google has NOT shut down their chinese language servers outside China.
They have only ADDED servers in china that chinese folk can use to search WHICH THE CHINESE CITIZENS KNOW ARE CENSORED.
If the Chinese citizens want the uncensored, they still have the option of using the uncensored site and dealing with latency, but for the MAJORITY of their searches, they now have a nice and fast websearching utility. Think about it like this, you search for something, you see there is a censored site. Now you KNOW there is a censored site and can maybe search using a proxy etc.
Google has done an amazing thing here, and really has empowered people in china while still working within the laws.
I applaud their decision to offer a proper service to Chinese citizens who just want a quick search on local news etc. This is what MOST people want.
Ask yourself something. How many days out of the week do you spend looking up how to overthrow dictatorships, and then ask yourself how many times you look up your favorite music artist, favorite movie, favorite actor, favorite recipe?
As far as I'm concerned this was a logical decision and by google NOT shutting down their chinese servers outside the country, they have really shown they are attempting to help people.
Villainizing a company because they are attempting to help their shareholders and at the same time offering a service we all really enjoy and use for a variety of subjects is completely assanine.
Google is simply interested in making money. Anything else is spin. Most slashdotters would rail against MS or SCO for such a stunt, so the reaction should be the same here. Not bullshit rationalization.
notice how they're not rushing into Burma or North Korea offering similar terms, why? because there's no profit to be made.
A. No local servers. Poor service. Censored invisibly. Failing market share.
B. Local servers. Better service. Censored visibly. Improving market share.
I know which I think is better.
The elephant in the room here is Congress' acquiescence to unconstitutional "reforms" in the US. Tom Lantos spouts off about how reprehensible Google and Yahoo are, and his voting record is not bad in a lot of cases, but he sure thinks you ought not to have a gun and he voted for a fair number of "patriot" act constitutional infringements.
I'd far prefer to see him working for Americans' civil liberties than those of the Chinese.
Google had a choice here: either provide Chinese residents with only the google.com service, which those residents had very unreliable access to, or provide the same google.com service as well as a reliable (but filtered) version that complies with local laws.
For a moment, forget that Google will profit financially from its position in China and just think about which action most benefits the Chinese residents. To me, it's a no-brainer: Google's decision here was the best one available. Was it perfect? Of course not. But it seems there was no better option.
A lot of people seem to be under the impression that Google should boycott China. Why? A Google boycott of China wouldn't do anything to help the situation. China doesn't rely on Google like the free world does, and the impact of a boycott would be minimal. If you want real change to happen in China, the best move is to expose the Chinese residents to the most information from outside sources that you can possibly expose them to. That's exactly what Google is trying to do.
also you must consider if the pages google happens to be spidering are in china, more than likely the higher number of them WILL have normal pictures of the place, compared to those of the tanks. where, outside the united states the place is remembered by the protest, in china it just may be a place to see. so page rank probably has more to do wiht it than google altering the image rank.
...why it's Google's job to take China to task for human rights? Doesn't it seem a little unfair, given we as a nation completely and utterly condone their practice implicitly by importing billions of dollars worth of goods and permanantly extending MFN status and whatnot? If Congress is so righteous about China, let's see some legislation. Oh, you mean it's easier and safer to have public hearings and just blame some tech companies? Okay, yeah, let's do that instead.
Seriously, am I the only one who finds it the peak of hypocrisy to see the legislative body of a lone superpower blaming Google for not doing enough to bring about human rights reform in China?
The issue is more complex than you give it credit. There was no ideal choice, so Google made a sensible compromise. They chose the path that gives Chinese searchers access to as much information as possible. Not doing this would only harm the Chinese citizen (by restricting their access to information to an even greater degree).
Change in China will eventually come, but it will come quicker if outside entities exploit every means of access to the Chinese that is available. That way future generations of Chinese leaders are more likely to be exposed to ideas such as freedom of information and the like.
You might not like the decision Goggle made, but it is grossly unfair to call it evil. Hmm, perhaps the real problem here is that Goggle clearly is trying to use a Utilitarian ethic, and this upsets people who don't like that moral system. The objectors do seem to prefer hard and uncompromising moral rules, rather than ones that bend and flex to fit the situation.
Anyhow Google isn't being evil, they are just trying to do the most good for the Chinese citizens as they can (as far as information access goes). It required that they do something a bit unsavory, but I for one agree that it is better than the alternatives they had to choose from. It isn't like they were giving them the Google searches we enjoy before; the Chinese Government was already interfering and wrecking that service.
-Drachasor
I'm not a Google fanboy, and I don't particularly trust Google. But I gotta side with Google on this one.
People seem to be arguing that China is evil, and implying that somehow Google can force China not to be evil by boycotting the country. I really can't imagine any scenario where that would work, even if every other search engine in the world joined them.
Other people seem to be arguing that Google is _supporting_ China, but they seem to ignore the fact that our own government has increased trade with China in an attempt to help shift Chinese internal power away from Beijing.
Now you have Google, who has almost no negotiating power with the Chinese government. They have to choose between doing nothing in China (which will certainly not help the Chinese people) or doing what they can in China. They chose to do what they can, and frankly, I think they did as much as can be expected. Certainly more than other search engines. Certainly more than Wal-Mart!
More information is better than less information. Google isn't providing misinformation, and when information is censored, they come right out and say it. That's a _good thing_. No, it's not ideal, but the alternative is nothing. Take the good you can get, folks. It's the only way you're ever going to get more.
No it isn't. It's idiotic! You have to almost completely drop out of the economy to avoid Chinese products, you aren't helping the Chinese by doing so, and completely outside of all that the Chinese are busy buying up our dollars to keep our debt propped up, so you're in the game one way or another.
I will be visiting China later this year and I'm very curious about what, if any, attempt will be made to keep various things out of my sight, but one thing's for sure: economically boycotting nations (as we do with Cuba) appears to produce the opposite effect. Try taking a stand that means something, not a phony stance that just makes you feel better about yourself.
One day I feel I'm ahead of the wheel / the next it's rolling over me / I can get back on / I can get back on