Slashdot Mirror
Google Targeted By Anti-Censorship Movement
wormnet.org writes "An article has been posted on The Observer reporting that Google has been targeted by the group "Students For A Free Tibet" because of the internet company's relationship with the Chinese government. The article states: "... more than 50,000 letters have been sent to Google bosses in recent days protesting at the company's decision to censor searches on its google.cn website in line with Beijing's wishes. Protesters have also staged public 'break-ups' with Google at demonstrations outside many of its offices around the world.""
they just think it's easier to harrass google then to take on the chineese government
Morality should come before profits. Google has violated its Do No Evil policy, and time will tell if it matters in the real world. Probably not. But they still suck for doing it.
Don't blame Google, blame China.
Who says we have to choose?
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
I've noticed in a lot of these items that it's Google that is singled out for the headline treatment, whilst Microsoft, Yahoo et al only get small mentions in the text, usually with a desultory "Microsoft & Yahoo also filter searches" type single sentence... and usually buried well down in any article as to be practically invisible
Donald 'Duck' Dunn: We had a band powerful enough to turn goat piss into gasoline.
Will they also be sending letters to the US Government over the attempted suppression of the Iraqi prisoner of war abuse images?
A lot of people talk about how google brings net services in, and that eventually that will do a lot more good than staying away would. That's not a dumb argument, or one that can be dismissed out of hand.
But I think that when people from outside of the country take a stand, and tell the truth about what's right and what's not, it makes a difference. There are people in China who are fighting, and when companies or foreign governments stand by what's right, those people know that they're not alone, and that they're not crazy, and what they're fighting for is real.
I take some comfort when the UN critizes US behavior in Guantanamo for that reason. I know the UN isn't going to be able to bring about a change in policy, but it's nice to know there's a world beyond talk radio and cable news coverage.
In google's defense, it is a lot of money. And I guess if they can believe their giant jetliner is good for the world, because they can fly people other rich people to africa to see what poverty is really like, then they can believe that what they're doing in china is good for the world too. I guess when you're that successful, everything you do is good for the world.
The whole of the USA is doing business in/with China. Why not pick on the clothing, shoe and other industries?
Google has worked hard to create this image of "the good company", successfully, I might add. They have most people, the media included, sold on their "we're the good guys" image. Well, thus it's a story when they don't really act it. This company that's supposed to be all about free information and such is censoring? OMGWTFBBQ! Scandal!
MS on the other hand is the company people love to hate. They actually aren't really that bad when you get down to it, they aren't the most scary monopoly (you want scary? look up Sysco) and for that matter there's questions to if they really are a monopoly. However they have the public image as the 800lb gorilla, that's kind of an asshole. Thus to hear that they screw with search results isn't really supprising.
There's also the fact that MS and Yahoo traditonally haven't had unbiased search engines. They have biased results, deliberatly, for a number of reasons. Google was really the first major search engine that not only didn't sell any spots or anything, but actively fought against tricks to try and bias your results higher. MS has been fighting a battle to try and really give good and relivant results, but won't let go of the want to mess with them artifically.
I don't really feel a lot of sympathy for Google as they brought this on themselves. They created the "Don't be evil" motto, they worked the PR to spin themselves as a good company, but then they chose to do something that seems to fly in the face of that. No supprise they wind up with egg on their face. The more perfect you project yourself as and the more you claim to have the moral high ground, the less people are willing to forgive of you.
Why blame Google for China's censorship? That is the most rediculously tactic I've seen. Google is an American company, and these students think it's Googles job to protest the Chinese government? Why don't these same students protest the Chinese government themselves?
I understand that censorship is bad, but this tactic actually makes Google look like the good guy when its being made into politics. If they don't like Googles censorship, they can use Yahoo, or Microsofts search engine, or even better they can use the Chinese governments search engine.
I know that my comment may sound a bit jaded and sarcastic, but... a laugh at others' expense.
But, well, lets look at this.
Can you find Iraqi prisoner abuse images in Google.
Google Image Search: iraqi prisoner
Yes
Is this an article about Google complying with the Great Firewall of China
Yes
Did Google comply with China?
Yes
Did Google censor the Iraqi prisoner abuse images
No
Did anybody (outside of the government) censor them?
No
That doesn't even touch on the fact that those images, originally would have been classified and technically should have been seen by censors long before they ever got out. Now, why doesn't it touch on that? Because it's completely nongermane.
I understand that you have a soapbox to stand on (and hey, go for it), but this is a story about a student organization that doesn't care about the issue you've brought up, and a company that didn't censor the images that you brought up.
Fortunately for everyone, boycotting is just as effective as censorship.
Because anyone with common sense can see that Google is being scapegoated here. Sure if you don't like Google, you can boycott Google, but why pick Google out, from all of the American companies in China who work with the Chinese government, including Yahoo, Microsoft, and others? This looks so much like politics that if Google were to actually go on CNN or worse, go to the liberal media, this situation could be blown up into something which in my opinion is not in anyones best interest.
If censorship is a problem, the solution is for Google to develop anti censorship technology, and make all searches completely annonymous for everyone. Otherwise, I don't see the point. Even with better technology there is nothing Google can do to fight censorship. The fact that Google is offering access to all the current information they offer access to is actually fighting censorship in a way, but if the government says to Google that they must either censor something or go to jail there is not much they can do in any country.
No, I imagine they won't be sending a letter to the US government. There is a big difference between being pissed off that the images got out and saying some nasty words, yet having the imagines remain...
http://images.google.com/images?q=Iraqi+prisoner+
Or taking images like this...
http://images.google.com/images?q=tiananmen
...and using the force of law to pull a China.
http://images.google.cn/images?q=tiananmen
Do you understand the difference a little better now?
"Do No Evil" is a meaningless piece of marketing. It does not define "evil", and even if it did, corporate marketing slogans are not the same as corporate policy.
They're stopping one American business from pumping money into an evil regime, while giving everyone else a more or less free pass. Where's the protests calling for people to stop supporting Cisco, whose involvement in the continuation of the great firewall of china goes back as far as at least 1998? Oh... there aren't any? The worst they're getting is occasional frowny faces on the Students for a Free Tibet blog? Hmm.
It's kind of just dumb. Google is basically being made into the collective conscience of America. We're expecting them to reject complicity in the Chinese regime, so that the rest of us don't have to. Except in doing this we're targeting one of the few companies who's actually potentially capable of making a positive effect in China if they do business there. The chinese-language Google page hosted outside China is still full and uncut; the Google inside china tells you when pages are censored and may be able to do more than that with time.
If these people get their way and Google pulls out of China, do you know what will happen? MSN Search will just step in and happily become the dominant and official search engine there. You'll have gained nothing, except now the western partner in censoring search within china will be someone who does it cheerfully and enthusiastically, instead of one who at least understands the gravity and inherent ethical problems of what they're doing.
Sure, censorship could be considered evil, but lets be sane here.
Google is being evil because they do business in China? Lots of businesses do the same thing, name one search engine in China that is not doing this. I'm not saying its right, but I'm not saying Google is declared evil overnight over this.
I think this is a political issue, I think this is about politics. Google is not a political organization, they are a corporation. Google of course is going to put profits before politics, what company doesnt do this? Napster? Kazaa? Do you actually think Google is powerful enough to go up against the Chinese government? I think it's a bit insane to expect that.
I think this political debate is also way too early, in 10, or 15 years when Google actually is powerful enough to take on the Chinese government, thats when you should have this debate. When we are using wifi Google internet access for free, and Google is literally everywhere, that is when Google can take on the Chinese government, and even then they'd do so with limited success.
Ultimately, if the Chinese people, or in specific the Chinese government, does not want Google to do certain things, and makes it illegal, there is nothing Google can do about it, just like Google cannot decide to let people share copyrighted mp3s, or put up their digital library in America. There are a lot of censorship issues, and Google is making plenty of enemies here in America, so if Google decides not to make enemies in China, I think the shareholders can understand.
If you were CEO of Google, and you already have just about every publisher, media exec, Bill Gates, and all these people in America pissed off at you, would you seriously go and piss off China so your competition can take advantage? As I see it, as a business decision, Google is doing what is in Googles best interest. I don't think we can debate that it was a wise business move, politics aside.
Don't blame Google, blame China.
Exactly. That argument is a complete false dilemma. The argument falsely implies that either Google or China is responsible for doing wrong -- fact is that they are both responsible.
China, for setting the policies. Google, for choosing to adopt them.
Why is Google the bad guy again? As I understand it:
1) Google's results are being censored by the government, typically by simply not allowing their traffic through, making it appear to be a technical malfunction.
2) There's no way for Google to avoid the censorship.
3) Google comes up with a way to disclose the censorship.
4) Alternatively, Google could walk, leaving Chinese search engines to filter results without any disclosure.
So if Google made the wrong decision, which one was better? Walking and leaving the Chinese with no awareness of the situation? Ignoring the situation and sticking with the status quo? Filtering results without disclosure? How would these steps help Tibet?
This is like boycotting Zhang Yimou's films because they attack the Chinese government through metaphor, rather than railing against it overtly and getting him imprisoned or killed.
The Chinese government is the problem, attacking Google is a huge waste of resources; how about a letter writing campaign to Beijing?
Why is it that people only care about morality on the Google China issue? We have this policy of corporations only acting out of profits, ok fine, EXCEPT in China?
Why is China the exception to the rule? Morality does not matter unless it's China? Human rights do not matter unless its China? It's as if we spend more time worrying about the human rights of the Chinese than our own. Please explain to me why the human rights issue in China is so important to us?
...that Google is using subterfuge? Doesn't anyone remember what happened when Google got hit with a DMCA by the Church of Scientology? Remember the outcry over Google removing certain search results? Do you also remember the ultimate solution? Google posted a copy of the actual DMCA request...which happened to contain the exact offending URLs...oh and just because of the way parser works, those URLs were hotlinks. Add to that the press involved and I think that the reality is at the end of the day, more people read that content than had ever thought to google it before.
Who here doesn't understand that this kind of behavior is way to both "be legal" and "don't be evil"? That a company that has a history of doing these kinds of end-runs around crummy laws is just as likely to do it in the future? Consider this:
Google.cn censors certain pages based on, most likely, a know list of offending sites and perhaps certain keywords. What happens on Google.cn if someone googles for freed0m? or fr33dom? or c1v1l rights or anything else? You can bet that until that variation pops up on the government radar, there will be a lot of traffic on those pages from Chinese users. It's not beyond the realm of possibility for Google's engine to even play some kind of silent "did you mean freedom?" game and show the best results regardless of misspelling.
One thing is for sure, I wouldn't put it past them. What incentive do Chinese search engines like Baidu have to do the right thing? First of all, to their culture, it's not even the right thing. It's quite possible that the management of Chinese search engines look upon it as their patriotic duty to censor, and zealously go beyond what is even required. Google is an American company...with a new Chinese arm. But the heart and the technology are still American and it is unlikely that Google could ever be as close to the government as other homegrown engines. Quite frankly, I'm shocked the Chinese government would even allow Google in to China. What do they have to gain? It's not like Google is bringing millions of manufacturing dollars. At best, a couple floors of technicians?
You can't stop information, and you can be pretty sure that Google knows that. That's why they are in the business of providing information. Sooner or later, the bar and the slippery slope will begin and either the Chinese government will realize they've been hoodwinked and kick Google out...or move to an entirely whitelist-based Internet...or people will master the tricks and the knowledge will spread as quickly as the latest viral video.
-JoeShmoe
.
-- I wonder which will go down in history as the bigger failure: the War on Drugs or the War on Filesharing
They are better off spending their time studying and perhaps one of them will come up with an algorithm that surpasses google, then they can form their own company, compete with google in all markets except the Chinese one.
Excuses Are Like Assholes - Everybody's Got One
I mean, go to http://www.google.com/intl/zh-CN/, search for "tiananmen square". You will get pictures of tanks and all the censored stuff.
www.Google.cn exists in addition to this. Is it realyl censorship if they provide more information?
Yohooo!!! I will protest then too.
. html or even http://horizon.nmsu.edu/101/pornography.html here. And I want to have no problems when searching for old Hindu symbol commonly known as swastika.
I will protest against censoring materials related to nazism & fashism. What about racism censorship? Poor kids on the block were killing others for no reason - why not to give them one???
And why U.S. ban so much books? http://www.banned-books.com/bblist.html here and here http://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/banned-books
What about for example lolicon? In Japan it's pretty normal, over here in Europe as well as in USA it's considered to be paedophilia. Strangely enough, "hentai" what's normal pr0n for us, in fact is "freaking" for them...
You can hardly expect people to have the same morality standards when their cultures are only several thousand years apart. And censorship is all about morality. That's in general. As to China in particular. Memorize one saying of old: people deserve their rulers. It's not that chinese did something new. It's not USA stopped supporting them. (And it's not that USA has no censorship of their own. Who doesn't?)
All hope abandon ye who enter here.
I know this is hard to understand, since it takes a little more thought than the usual knee-jerk "censorship is bad, mmkay?" response, but try to stay with me...
Google's presence or absence in China does not affect the level of censorship present on the Chinese internet.
When a user in China does a search on google.com (now or in the past) and the search returns results which the Chinese government feels must be censored, the Chinese "great firewall" simply resets the connection and blocks the user from accessing Google for some period of time. The user sees nothing, and is now unable to use Google at all. The user has no idea that this was the result of censorship, and will probably assume that Google's service just sucks.
Now, with google.cn, when the user does the same query, they simply get censored results, along with a notice that the results have been censored. They do not lose access to Google. They are told that censorship occured, so they have no less information than they would have had before. To the Chinese user, the service of google.cn is strictly superior to that of google.com.
Now, I know the argument a lot of people like to make here: "Google should take a moral stand by refusing to have any part in this!" To that I say, how dare you declare that the Chinese people should be deprived of service on moral grounds? Let the people you claim to be supporting decide what Google should do. I think you will find it hard to find a single Chinese resident who is against Google's action.
Don't get me wrong. Censorship sucks, and I think the Chinese government is despicable. But, Google's actions are only improving the lives of the Chinese people while doing nothing to increase the government's control over them. Google has done nothing wrong.
Just making sure I understand the argument:
Google is better than Yahoo/Microsoft
Google censors, just like Yahoo/Microsoft
Google is still better than Yahoo/Microsoft because people are singling Google out
Everyone knows how Yahoo/Microsoft do business. Google wouldn't be getting slammed unless they were so insistent they were above it all.
Google doesn't want to censor? Easy solution. Don't. They say that they must, because it will cost them market share in an emerging market? Congratulations, Google, you're sacrificing morality for the bottom line, just like Microsoft/Yahoo. You can gussy it up all you want but that's what it is.
There's nothing new about a company getting gritty for what's in the best interests of its bottom line, particularly a company like Google, who is now doing business with entities like governments and large corporations, which are notoriously iffy on the moral front. That's the nature of the beast. Just don't shove this "do no evil" crap down our throats because it's no longer true. Google's not evil, not yet, but the bloom is definitely off the rose.
This is not a scaleable moral argument. You yourself, as a matter of practical necessity, do absolutely nothing about *most* of the moral issues you are aware of (slavery in Sudan, anyone?). That doesn't make you guilty of those things. In most aspects of life we have to choose our battles.
You need to say why Google should have chosen this issue as their line in the sand. The argument has been put forward that it is better for them to do what they can within the law, such as it is, in China, rather than leave the Chinese audience to Chinese search engines which by being local can fall much more squarely under Party control. Even a partial Google is better than none at all, and still moves the country toward freedom of information (albiet more slowly).
Or that's what they argue, anyway. Why not deal with the argument, rather than handing out moral-high-horse generalisations whose end effect might well be worse for those who have much more to lose? This kind of action / inaction / pseudo-action can also constitute an abdication of responsibility.
This is patently untrue based on my understanding of the current situation. I cannot test it (not being located in China) but I believe that going to google.com from mainland china will now redirect you to google.cn, in the same way that going to google.com in the UK will take you to google.co.uk.
Perhaps there is some way to still get around this, I'm not sure, but people who were used to getting the regular google.com page are now getting the censored version, almost certainly.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
The great firewall of China is not news. Everyone has known about it. Everyone knows that Cisco pretty much built it. How is it that Cisco didn't get this kind of protesting? Lots of American IT vendors have been involved with Chinese censorship from the beginning. Billions have already changed hands.
What's special about Google?
Can it be that this darling business up and comer is just a little too new to the world of big business, and doesn't have the contacts and the lobbyists to protect these sorts of activities yet? Can it be that other more established members of big business are working furiously to hand Google their balls over this thing by engineering a PR disaster?
I've always thought it was a bad thing for American companies to be involved in something like Chinese censorship. I am glad to see this being questioned now. I'm just wondering why suddenly now? Google did not do something new in China. The trail had already been blazed by Cisco and Microsoft and other big dogs.
We all know that there has been a full bore astroturf campaign to get people to distrust Google, particularly here on Slashdot. We know that Microsoft in particular is interested in manipulating the Slashdot community through astroturfing. I admit, a patent lawsuit from some tiny holding company would be more their MO these days, but could all of this be coming from Redmond?
For now, it povides comfort to the Chinese who want to be free, to know that they're not alone.
Which is probably on par with the comfort the Hungarians felt in 1956 and the Czechoslovakians experienced in 1968, when the West sympathized so loudly with their plight. And probably about as effective.
Max
My god carries a hammer. Your god died nailed to a tree. Any questions?
China does indeed have aconstitution. In theory it has a very good constitution. Unfortunately most of the core clauses on freedoms and rights are terminated with the subclause : "...except where this would disturb the peace/breach social order/endanger the harmony of the state".
And it does put all those little "exception" antiterror/antiracism-laws into an interesting light even..
Has it occurred to any of these "people"* that:
1. When the Chinese search for "Tiananmen" they're probably looking for a laundromat, a restaurant or hotel and might actually be pissed that they can't find one because "Tiananmen" is followed by "Massacre" in the 1st 1000 hits of a search engine. Did you ever think of that? Maybe they have to live over there.
2. Some information is better than no information. Give the Chinese some credit - they're smart enough to read between the lines.
3. Google moved there to give the Chinese faster service - maybe, just maybe it will prove fast enough to outrun the censors.
4. BTW, did these protestors ever think to ask the Chinese people what they thought about Google, or are they using the GWB method of democracy where the results are only valid so long as they follow your own agenda?
5. The US used boycotts in Iraq and while Saddam and friends were never missed a meal it was the people that suffered. Did you not notice that?
6. At the end of the day, my thoughts are summed up as mostly against the insidious nature of US politics and culture. Seems like every hour produces another opportunity to say, "WTF is wrong with these politicians" and, "when are the people going to get off of their dead asses and do something about it all." This whole Google ordeal is not one of those instances. In fact, it's quite the opposite. Oh, and thanks for blemishing what would otherwise be an admirable move by the US.
*Just gotta love the stupidity of mob mentality.
You want the market, you censorship the contents;
or roughly:
1) If your principal motivation is money, you would censor.
2) Google censors.
3) Therefore Google's principal motivation is money.
4) Therefore Google is evil.
Here are your goofs: 3 doesn't follow from 1 and 2.
For extra credit, note that 4 doesn't follow from 3.