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Google's China Problem
Wraithfighter writes "The New York Times has a rather lengthy, but informative, piece on the origins of Google's current Chinese search engine, as well as a very informative look at how censoring is actually done in China. From the article: 'Are there gradations of censorship, better and worse ways to limit information? In America, that seems like an intolerable question -- the end of the conversation. But in China, as Google has discovered, it is just the beginning.'"
Are there gradations of censorship, better and worse ways to limit information? In America, that seems like an intolerable question
Oh come on, very few in Amertica would argue against any limitations on information.
From trade secrets to copyrights to defamation to classified documents to pornography laws, restrictions on information are inherent in our whole legal system. How about court sealed documents? Furthermore, atatcking "propaganda" stations has long been considered a legitmimate aim of our military in waging wars.
Of course there gradations of censorship. The debate has ALWAYS been about which information can be restricted. Pretty much everyone agrees that some should be. Prentending otherwise is unhelpful and it's dishonest.
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Near the end of the first page, Lee sums up the attitude on both sides of the Pacific pretty well: "I don't think they care that much. I think people would say: 'Hey, U.S. democracy, that's a good form of government. Chinese government, good and stable, that's a good form of government. Whatever, as long as I get to go to my favorite Web site, see my friends, live happily.'"
It's nice to know the Chinese are as apathetic about their government as we are in the U.S.
What?
Having some experience with eastern European countries during their communist regime, I can tell you it really is just a technicality for day to day live.
On one hand, people first and foremost are interested to live in peace and comfort and want to see their children doing the same. If they can achieve this, the philosophical aspects of the current emperor of the land is of no importance. On the other hand, if they can't they will damn whatever emperor makes their live miserable and at some point will seek to improve their lot by exchanging emperor.
For the less philosophical level this means: If you starve or are terrorised by the killer squads, you don't give shit about if those responsible are brandishing little red books or are the stoutest supporters of free capitalism.
This all leads to the simple conclusion, that communism (as much as capitalism or all other -isms) are just minor technicalities only mostly happy people with nothing better to do can worry about.
There are still many ways to bypass the block. Assuming one knows that the web page exists. Thanks to this "optimization", this is no longer the case.
If the effect of this "filter that is no censorship" is merely cosmetic, then why was Google forced to include it or face being banned from operating in China?
Surely there's a difference between "this event happened (because there's search results for it) but your country doesn't want you to see any information about it " and "this doesn't exist - look - that event ***never happened***"?
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A recent PBS|Frontline documentary covered how the Chinese government has gone about censoring one major event from its past including on the internet, it's free to view online:
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/tankman/
Flamebait because he doesn't elaborate?
The U.S. is very good at withholding information. Not to unload too big a can of postmodernist wupp-ass on anyone, but it does so by creating whatever reality it wants. There STILL ARE/WERE WMDs in Iraq in the minds of many people because a chain of The New York Times, Judy Miller, Scooter Liddy, Dick Cheney SAID there were. Why _withhold_ information when you are the country with the Madison Avenue/Hollywood expertise to _create_ whole realities? When you have the mass seeing your reality, any "truths" are just insignificant background chatter.
I guess it was the comparison between apartheid South Africa and the U.S. where this first became glaringly apparent to me. Generally, South Africa dealt with dissent by "slips in the jail shower" and "suicides out the third floor window" -- excuses which are themselves shapings of reality, but crude post-incident excuses. It was only in the very latest years that they discovered the proactive power of advertising. If you aren't sipping KWV brandy in your decorated 10 room split-level in Soweto like the commercial shows you, it's because you're a LOSER. Doesn't have anything to do with politics.
It was their own fault it took them so long to discover advertising as a weapon. They only allowed TV in the '70s. In the U.S., we were born swimming in media and generally don't even recognize its inherent unreality.
Only in this country, censorship is not done in the name of the government. It's done almost solely to "protect" children or those with weak sensativities. I don't necessarily agree with the idea but I am saying that it does exist here.
Is it 5:30 yet?
Not only is google participating in censorship in China, they are also involved in some activities in the U.S. which are disquieting. For example, they have been documented (see link http://www.infowars.com/articles/sept11/sheen_goog le_censoring_story_again.htm on at least two occasions not indexing important alternative news stories, such as the one on Charlie Sheen's 9/11 comments above. Insomuch as they fail to index an important story which has been heavily visited and linked to, it is clear that they are engaging in de-facto censorship.
Censoring is a red-herring. If the citizens can not get to the info, then Google is only focused on what they can get to. In addition, Google notifies them that it is censored, where MS and Yahoo do not even bother.
The real problem is the use of the services for finding and punishing citizens. Microsoft and Yahoo have been turning over any and all information to govs. with a glee in their eye and $ in the checkbook. In fact, in the most recent episode, Yahoo turned over a DRAFT of an e-mail. This is not something that went out to the general public. It was not used anywhere. It was simply thoughts that are now being used against ppl. Yahoo/Microsoft will hang their head while crossing their fingers and winking their eye.
In contrast, Google has so far fought against American Gov ( and other govs. including chinese) about releasing any information that can be used in this way. Google did release info concerning ONLY child porn, but nothing that allowed a witch hunt by our admin. And so far, it does not appear that Google is releasing info about what individuals do.
But I have to wonder, how soon before Google does turn evil and starts releasing. Once they do, they will be heading down a very slippery and steep slope, that will force them to join the likes of Yahoo, Microsoft, Enron, etc. in names that are now synonymous with evil.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
>Google isn't censoring the internet for the chinese, they are optimizing it.
Thats a new one.
They are omitting results due to local laws. If this is optimizing, why don't they omit every single search result in America that would break local laws here?
The surprise isn't how often we make bad choices; the surprise is how seldom they defeat us.
Communism is the dictatorial power of the people through a proletarian revolution. There never was a proletarian revolution in China, for the simple reason China didn't have a proletariat. The revolution in China was agrarian, and the system implemented was Maoism, which isn't anywhere near communism except for the fact that the state took over all the private property.
Since 1978 China is essentially a state-capitalist dictatorship with local (and primitive) democracy, with remaining socialism only on the countryside (state-owned farms leased to farmers). The state-owned property has largely been returned to private interests, and nowhere in the world will you find as many privately owned businesses as in China.
China of today is communist only by name, and this won't change because the party needs to pretend it is implementing "socialism with Chinese characteristics" instead of capitalism, because the party was founded on a Marxist-Leninist basis.
China of today is thus as much communist as North Korea is democratic ("People's Democratic Republic of Korea") or East Germany was democratic ("Deutsche Democratische Republik"). Why is this so incredibly hard for Americans to understand?
Please repeat after me: China is a state-capitalist dictatorship. There you go! Now when you know the basics, perhaps you will be able to discuss the problems of China with some more credibility.
>google add a note at the bottom of the page saying something to the effect of "some of your search results have been omitted in compliance with local laws".
Suppose I search for "rumsfeld secretary of defense " and I get a nice set of results but at the bottom of the search page it says "some of your search results have been omitted in compliance with local laws".
Now is it;
1. Faked pictures/fan-fic stories about Donald Rumsfeld that clearly (or maybe not so clearly) break one of the multiple local decency laws.
or
2. Legitimate criticism of a high-ranking official highlighting his various professional flaws worthy of public discussion.
For me the whole Google/China thing comes down to the question - Do you trust a company and a government to think for you?
The surprise isn't how often we make bad choices; the surprise is how seldom they defeat us.
From TFA:
I expected [famed political blogger] Zhao [Jing] to be much angrier with the American Internet companies than he was. He was surprisingly philosophical. He ranked the companies in order of ethics, ticking them off with his fingers. Google, he said, was at the top of the pile. It was genuinely improving the quality of Chinese information and trying to do its best within a bad system. . . . Yahoo came last, and Zhao had nothing but venom for the company.
"Google has struck a compromise," he said, and compromises are sometimes necessary. Yahoo's behavior, he added, put it in a different category: "Yahoo is a sellout. Chinese people hate Yahoo." The difference, Zhao said, was that Yahoo had put individual dissidents in serious danger and done so apparently without thinking much about the human damage.
A useful perspective from one of the internet celebrities in China. I hope Yahoo appreciates all the good publicity its actions in China are garnering.
Do two quick searches to see for yourself, the difference between google.com and google.cn. These links refer to the image search on the U.S. and Chinese Google pages, respectively.
http://images.google.com/
http://www.google.cn/imghp?hl=zh-CN&tab=wi&q=
Search for "Tiananmen" on both sites and notice the *significant* difference in content returned by each.
Click here.
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
Has it occurred to you that the Chinese people who have the money to move to the U.S. are probably doing pretty well? The poor people who can't afford to move probably have a very different opinion. A few months ago, I believe, there was some video smuggled out of China. It was of farmers violently being removed from their land. They would certainly disagree with your friend's opinion of the Chinese government. When you are a-ok, it's true that you don't care about who or what your government is. But in a democratic system, WHEN things go wrong for you, there is at least a means for peacefully having your voice heard. The Chinese don't have that luxury.
did it ever occur to you that she feels that way because she does not have to live under the Chinese government?
It's all the same to her:
1) she isn't being persecuted by the U.S. gov.
2) she isn't being persecuted by the Chinese gov.
Of course, 2 is only because she (and her family) had the money to leave.
In China things are certainly different. There is a large (and growing) number of people who are upset with their government:
Number of mass protests in China:
2004: 74,000
2005: 80,000
And these are official numbers.. released by the Chinese government. Feel free to lookup numbers for the past several years.. you'll see the number of protests are growing each year.
So who are the protesters? Almost all of them are Peasants. Those who are the poorest, also happen to have the fewest rights.
So ask yourself: when was the last time you saw that many protests in the U.S.? When was the last time you saw the poor protesting because of their treatment?
Yeah, it's all the same to her..... as long as she doesn't have to live there.
Help me take back Slashdot. When did 'News for Nerds' become 'FUD and Conspiracy Theories for Extremist Nutjobs'?
I think you just ignored what he was saying. If you know a certain page exists, then there are many ways to bypass China's internet filtering. It's not perfect, and it never will be.
But by removing the blocked pages from Google's index completely, it's as if they never existed. In fact, blocking them no longer matters, because most people will never realize they exist in the first place.
Fundamentally, it's the difference between being handed a history book that's been filled with black marker lines covering stuff that's "redacted," and being given a history book that's been totally rewritten to only show one point of view. In the first case, you're at least painfully aware that you're getting a one-sided viewpoint, in the latter case you're not.
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Google did not do anything ethically wrong.
Blocking the results ensures that chinese people can use Google.
It is not teribly difficult for a chinese citizen to bypass the firewall, but guess what? It is also fairly easy for a chinese person to bypass the google censorship too!
Those who cannot figure out how to bypass the google censorship would likely have trouble bypassing the Great Firewall. Therefore the censored results are all that they have a use for.
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Maybe I shouldn't tell you about how Alexander Hamilton and his banking buddies got rich buying up confederation currancy for pennies on the dollar and then passing laws that it would all be honored at full value.
Or how much of the revolution was just mob violence at anyone who tried to regulate the economy including the burning of multiple warehouses and private residences because they were involved in British attempts to regulate the illegal rum trade.
Or how Thomas Jefferson, contrary to what Swordfish would tell you, never actually executed a man for treason on the Whitehouse lawn, he did have a man accused of treason and basically run out of town using his political power simply because the two of them didn't get along.
If you want to go a little further down, Abraham Lincoln publicly stated that he had no intrest in slavery either way, it was none of his business. He engaged int eh civil war to hold together the Union and nothing else. His later decision to emancipate the slaves in the area under martial law was commendable, but it wasn't part of his agenda, nor was he able to emancipate the slaves in territory that had remained in the Union as it wasn't under his war-powers control. I have the utmost of respect for the founders of our nation which I believe to be one if, if not the greatest in the world, but these men were far from saints and it's soemthing that people like to overlook.
Didn't the president of China visit Bill Gates before Pres. Bush?
I agree completely that what we have today is far from the ideals of the Constitution, my point is that so was what they had then. As you said it men, are men.
I don't think revolution is the solution. What has revolution brought us that reform could not? We end up with the same institutions, the same corruption, just with a different set of leaders.
Like quite a few people on /. I own a domain, and manage a few websites. Because China prevents connections to certain websites, how about if the webmasters of the world somehow got themselves organised and were able to mirror some of the censored content on their website for a period of time. Then at some pre-arranged signal (I'm thinking of the lighting of the Olympic flame in Beijing in 2008 here) everyone switches their home page over to a new one where banned chinese information (pictures, words) is prominent. Also included, could be a couple of links to other sites hosting similar material aka a webring. The point being that up until the lighting of the flame, no information is available, but once the flame is lit then the whole web "lights up" with banned information. It would be impossible for the chinese to censor all these websites, even during the time that the Olympics occurs.
Somehow, a register should be set up of content providers and hosters, anyone registering for content hosting would not know of anyone else - the whole thing would be secret - and the register would allot content to hosters so that the whole thing is multiply redundant. Finally, the whole effort should be overseen by someone respectable who can report if things are going OK or if there's a shortage in any particular area.
There's a couple of years yet until 2008, should be enough time for a mature discussion and ample time to develop a co-ordinating website and distribute the required content.
Thoughts anyone?
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