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Google Admits Compromising Principles in China
muellerr1 writes "Google co-founder Sergey Brin admitted that it had adopted 'a set of rules that we weren't comfortable with' in their Chinese activities. Though it doesn't yet sound like they're admitting to actually doing evil, it does appear that they are thinking about pulling out of China rather than compromise their 'do no evil' motto."
If Google is not evil and China is, then it's just logical that they'd pull out. We wouldn't want a rift in the space-time continuum now, would we?
The China censorship issue was a very difficult decision and, no matter how you look at it, they chose the less moral option... If they truly follow up and reverse their policy on China I will have to cease my usual cynicism and admit that Google may truly be a _moral_ company!
Go Brin! Go Google!
it is questionable whether Google could afford to turn its back on China's explosive economy
You know that if you were running Google, you wouldn't have turned your back to China. Google did no evil here.
Speaking in Washington, Sergey Brin, Google's billionaire co-founder, said the company, which operates under the motto "do no evil", had adopted "a set of rules that we weren't comfortable with".
In a hint that Google could adjust its stance in China in the future, he added: "Perhaps now [emphasis mine] the principled approach makes more sense."
So what took you so long Sergey? Why now? Why couldn't you see this was a bad idea from the start? Talk about coming to the party late!
Just how much back-pedalling Google does now should be interesting, as this is no doubt going to cause revenue problems in the long run and a bit of a publicity flap in the short run, though if Google decides to finally stand on its principles and other companies like Microsoft and Yahoo don't follow along, it should regain a lot of standing in many people's eyes. Well, except for the Chinese government's anyway...
GetOuttaMySpace - The Anti-Social Network
From their FAQ: I thought everyone on Slashdot hated the RIAA, the MPAA, and Microsoft. Why do you keep hyping CDs, movies, and Windows games?
Big corporations are what they are. They sell us cool stuff with one hand and tighten the screws on our freedoms with the other. We hate them every morning and love them every afternoon, and vice versa. This is part of living in the modern world: you take your yin with your yang and try to figure out how to do what's right the best you can. If you think it has to be all one way or the other, that's cool, share your opinions, but don't expect everyone else to think the same.
Nobody is perfect, not even Google.
I certainly hope that other companies, particularly Yahoo, which has been implicated in providing information to Chinese authorities leading to the arrest of political dissidents, will feel pressured by Google's recent announcement to be more candid about their own policies regarding operations in China. If our big Internet players were to stand up for what is right, it'd be a powerful statement for human rights.
Following a countries laws is evil? To hell with paying taxes then!!!
Click Click Bloody Click PANCAKES!
I understand that chinese market is tempting, but any company that I shall trust with so many information on me shall not be ready to compromise with any govern / administraion / authority. They'll gain China, but they'll loose me.
It's easy to admit you did something bad after the first few large paychecks for compromising your beliefs. I'm sure that pile of cash will soothe their guilt over the decision.
How will the shareholders feel if they pull out of China? Would that be acting in the shareholders' best interests? I'm not sure if ignoring a possible 1.3 billion people would be the best for them in the long run.
It's like sex, except I'm having it!
It sounds like you're saying that since greed is universal, it's acceptable to help an oppressive regime in the name of profit.
I know I'm going from zero to Godwin in only ten seconds, but the Nazis were just doing their jobs, too. Obviously there is a huge difference between filtering search results and gassing people and putting them in mass graves, but the logic doesn't improve any as the severity decreases.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Googlasia went public today sporting a motto "Do As Little Evil As Possible". Stocks soared from the opening price.
It will be interesting to see how this holds against their primary competitor, Microsoft which has embraced the Chinese market. They do not stand to lose their image or their corporate motto of "Screw Everyone."
Do no Evil... Do compromises.
Google complies with the DMCA, which requires it censor certain search results (for example, "kazaalite" http://www.google.com/search?q=kazaalite will display a notice at the bottom indicating search results were removed).
Admittedly, it doesn't go as far as China's censorship, but this is a slippery slope. Why is censorship there "evil", but censorship here is not? Google is complying with the law. Yes, I think it's a bad law. But since when is obeying the law evil? Why is it up to Google to crusade against government policy? Are they some kind of political super-hero?
If Google stay in China, people call them evil hypocrits, pandering to a brutal government. If Google leaves, people call them stubborn information whores. Either way, the people of China are the ones that lose. Between the two, I think that the "some censored iformation is better than no information". While they can't learn about tank boy, perhaps they can learn other useful information (encryption, bomb making, etc.)
As much as we like to make fun of America, at least we don't have to worry about [severe] state sanctioned censorship [yet].
Google has employees in China. I can imagine how the treatment of these employees might be used to the advantage of the Chinese government if Google is weighing whether to pull out. It would be truly dirty for the government to threaten the welfare of former google employees in discussions with the management, and it would lead to quite an international conundrum. At the same time, it is possible. China isn't exactly known for protecting human rights. Thoughts?
After making such statements, they have no choice but to pull out now.
Many companies are starting to follow Google's lead in many ways and on many things. If they say they are considering pulling out and then fail to do it, the disappointment in Google will be enormous. If Google lived and prospered everywhere EXCEPT China, that could only serve to make Google look good and China look bad.
I feel pretty much the same about IP and DRM issues in the world where if the world refuses and legislates against IP and DRM leaving only the US with such restrictive laws, it will really make the US look bad and evil.
Is a publicly traded company will see how big their balls are when the stock holders get involved.
EGOTIST, n. A person of low taste, more interested in himself than in me.
This will be a first in this scale.
It might be so that we might need to ask vatican to bestow sainthood on google at this rate.
I have to admit im impressed.
Read radical news here
The article doesn't say anything about google pulling out of China! They seem just concerned on justifying their actions in the past... DAMMIT! I knew I shouldn't RTFA...
I've never in my life seen a corporate head admit wrongdoing so quickly without being forced to by a court. This is simply amazing.
San Francisco Photographers
When Google entered China, they agreed to censor their search engine. Perhaps that could be an acceptable thing to do if they were asked to censor child pornography sites, but it really does depend on what they are being asked to censor.
The Chinese government was asking them to cover up a government massacre of hundreds, possibly thousands, of people. To do such a thing is extremely disrespectful to those that were killed in this massacre.
Google claim that they want to give people the information they're looking for, but in China, they're withholding the truth about what happened on June 4, 1989. Hundreds of innocent people murdered. You can't assist in the cover-up of something like that and claim that your integrity hasn't been compromised.
Mr Brin was in Washington to ask US senators to approve a plan that would safeguard "net neutrality" - the current online system which means all internet content is handled equally.
In meetings with Republican John McCain, a member of the Senate committee that oversees telecoms issues, he argued against a system that would allow telephone and cable companies to collect premium fees from companies such as Google, Microsoft and Yahoo! for faster delivery of their services
"The only way to have a fast lane that is useful - that people will pay a premium for - is if there are slow lanes," he said.
Is it just me, or is the last sentence an argument against net neutrality?
I never clip my fingernails for fear of dangling symbolic links.
I think it's interesting that Google's execs had made this decision, but I think it may harm them in the long run because essentially China's market is going to grow without them. Opportunities lost and means to affect progress on a country that nearly imploded on itself in the 1950s and 1960s that probably would benefit the most. The more I look at our own country, the USA, the more I see that Google ought to leave it by comparison. I admit, The PRC as a governmental entity is a digusting little thing, but the US isn't really too different by comparison. The US has the PATRIOT act, The FCC, and federal statutes against porno, encryption, etc... So, is this really just a Coke/Pepsi challange of ethics? I think so for a one reason; both countries, in fact all the countries Google operates in, has devils for governments. Whether it's civil liberty violations or compromised property rights [one could argue property rights are civil rights of a kind...], most countries do evil, and Google still does work in them. I'm not asking for Google's exec to implode into some Socratic Apologie, but I do think Google's execs ought to review the premises they set their motto upon.
Do No Evil...How do they define it? To what purpose does one not wish to do evil? Is it to appease God or the public sensibility of evil? Do they, the Google execs, really know what evil is? I think it can be simply answered, but I know for one that I cannot answer it, but I hope they reconsider their motto's premises as they reconsidered their dealings in China...
-- Bridget
As far as I can tell Google continued its "Do no evil" policy in China. They didn't take anything away from Chinese users- they merely offered a new Chinese service that openly filters results. How many Chinese search engines mention that they filter results? When your alternatives are to let the Chinese filter Google for you (making your search engine slow and unusable, and hiding that results are filtered) or filter it yourself (so people actually use your search engine, and tell people you are censoring data), what would you do? Google isn't hurting the Chinese- (Unlike Yahoo!, which gives the Chinese government personal data) it just can't help them much.
You are reading a copy of my copyrighted post.
I don't understand why there's anger at Google for obeying Chinese laws. Do I agree with those laws? Hell no. But business is business. Google doesn't make money from fostering democracy in foreign lands. They make money from selling ads. China is potentially a very large market, and so Google is doing what it has to as a profit-oriented venture.
If you feel the need to blame anyone, blame the dictators. Google is just doing business.
And before this discussion degenerates into WWII analogies, remember that Google is just a damn search engine and what's being repressed are just frigging web pages. No human is being abused or tortured by Google's actions.
The reaction I've seen on this site on others to Google's decision is way out of line to what was done.
I have no doubt that China will need to liberalize their government. If they want to be an effective technological power, they will need smart people and that means increasingly free access to information.
The more breathing room we give them as a company, and the less people target them, focusing law suits related to searching, with the only reason they sue google being they are the most recognizable, then the less likely they are to become "evil". We sue them into the ground, then it becomes news when they turtle?
Windows has more viruses because linux has more virus coders.
of why I still refuse to trust Google with my information. "Do no evil" - except when it hurts the shareholder's bottom line. Google is still a public corporation and no matter what the employees profess to strive for the company exists to create profits. I am pretty surprised that Google does not have a 10 year policy of erring on the side of morality to prove to skeptics like me that their motto is more than just marketing hype. To me it appears that having a stock price over $300.00 / share is the real priority.
-SmR
Yeah but google links to the complaint which is probably just as bad because it explicitly states which websites are removed.
Ooo man the floppy drive is broken. No wait. The computer is just upside down.
There has to be a point where the good you're doing outweighs the bad, and you're actions are no longer 'evil' - maybe like running a succesful, pro libertarian company and providing access to a lot information by making some concessions to a government you wouldn't by choice be on best terms with. I'm not saying that they got the balance right to avoid the 'evil' tag, just that there has to be a tipping point on any decison.
Google drops conservative sites from Google News. Interesting that 98% of all political donations by Google employees went to support Democrats. Also, Al Gore is a senior adviser to Google.
Now, I'm not playing a partisan finger-pointing game. But these kinds of "censorship" tactics give the appearance of "evil" worse than that which they are trying to avoid, IMO. Especially when there seems to be political motives. If some news site posts factual news, real honest truth, then I don't see how you can object to it on any basis just because you don't happen to like it. That holds whether the truth hurts the political Right or the political Left.
Constitutionally Correct
Apparently the Google sense of good includes pedophiles, drug dealers and nazis. In Brazil Orkut is used for such criminal activities and yet Google REFUSES to provide information about the users.
So pedophiles are safe to use google stuff and be sure that Google won't denounce them to the authorities.
This is nice PR and a nice spin attempt. The question is what follow through it will see. Maybe i'm just too dyed in the wool of my cynicism but right now the only "wrestling with the problem" they are doing is rolling around on a pile of money they are making through compromising thier ethical stance.
It will boil down to which is more important, profits or ethics. They're a publically held company which makes me think ethics won't win.
I'm a fiscal conservative, it's a pity we don't have a political party anymore
This is them pulling out of China, not going into it! I agree that they shouldn't have entered China in the first place, but at least they are admitting their mistake. I'm impressed by a company that can admit it is doing something morally wrong, but take steps to correct themselves despite the fact that they will lose billions of dollars by doing so.
Now they just need to admit that DRM on Google Video is evil, too, and they're back in my good books!
Did you RTFA? All he says is he can see why someone else would come to a different conclusion than they did. And it's not like Google pulling out is going to do a shit. You think making a search engine is something special? If Google pulls out, they'll just use some other censored search engine like Baidu. If eBay pulls out, they'll just use another online auction site. No matter what any corporation does, it won't have a damn effect on the grand scale in China. There is enough technical expertise there already to do anything an American company would--perhaps inferior, but none of these things (search engines, auction sites, portals, etc...) are rocket science. Pulling American corporations out of China (to be replaced by native corporations) would only lessen our fucking leverage in China. Think about it.
The middle class (the people in China that can actually USE the internet) there is growing and prosperous. By and large, they're damn happy with the ways things have gone since 1989. (If you don't believe so, I invite you to visit any modern Chinese city and look at its amazing rate of development.) If there's going to be any revolt, it'll probably be from the countryside...from the people who don't have internet access anyway.
When it's an evil law.
No, seriously. Obeying an evil law is an evil act. If Congress, in a drunken stupor, decided that it was now a law that you must kill your parents, obeying that law would be evil. You should fight it in court, and failing that, just refuse to comply. Requiring something by law does not make it right. It just means that there are real consequences to doing the right thing if the right thing doesn't agree with the law.
Money has more value than principles.
As a company, they will always chase money. I doubt they will "pull out", the tie in is too strong for them to compete now.
"So there he is, risen from the dead. Like that fella, E. T." - Father Ted Crilly
that's talked about when it comes to censorship and the Internet but never USA or France or Germany? Try searching for info or for Nazi paraphinelia using France's Google. There is instances of censorship all over the world. USA is the heaviest censoring country in the world; this is appearant when one tries to hold a serious conversation with an American about what is really going on in Iraq. Come on, leave China alone already! China is SO evil, oooh they are so bad and they control the flow of information in China via Google! OOOh, I'm Shocked I tell you shocked! And SO outraged I will stop buying Chinese-made goods starting ah...next week!
Is it "Do no Evil" or "Don't be evil" ?
I've heard both attributed to the Google motto, but they are very different imperatives.
There are moral models in which a good person might have to do an evil for some greater good. (Work with China for the purpose of engagement)
It would also be possible to produce horrible effect without ever commiting any identifiable evil act. (We are just following the local laws.)
I'm going to assume that you meant "the decision for Google to censor in the first place". Sorry, but I disagree here. Google had a golden opportunity that they, in my opinion, wasted. Here's a large, cutting edge company that has the respect of the internet community and is seen by many as a role model in the corporate world.
If Google's leaders had stated firmly, openly, and loudly that they would never condone censorship of any kind, especially as it pertained to delivering services in China, they not only would have earned the respect of many but would have been essentially in a position to shame any company that didn't follow their lead. It would have given them moral high ground to accuse other companies (e.g. Yahoo) of kowtowing to the will of a government that condones what we view as an oppresive policies; namely censorship and imprisonment of those that disagree with the government.
The fact that google compromised their principles and defied their own mission statement has burned a lot of goodwill that may never be recovered. Good for them that they are considering changing thier policies. I hope they do.
Maybe I'm not keeping close enough tabs on this situation. Can someone please enlighten me as to what the big deal is, with following -another- country's laws to do business there? I thought that was -good- business ethics? (I'm not a business person at all though, so.. I guess mmmv with thinking that way).
space is pretty cool.
If people would only care about the problems in their own countries first.
Then Slashdot could be a place with news for nerds and stuff that matters.
Google is one of the very few companies which have a chance to remain "morally good" while still being successful. They just need to know that the people appreciate their "don't be evil" credo. For those who care checkout http://web.amnesty.org/pages/internet-110506-actio n-eng.
regards
lukas
Now if they'd just stop kicking off perfectly legit adsense customers, they'd be back in good graces.
That fact is that Castro might look good compared to Stalin, but that doesn't make him a good example of a fair government.
Seriously, what options did google have? It could either appeal to the Chinese government, or not offer it's service to the chinese people in any shape or form. I think everyone needs to take a step back and look at the real evil in this picture: China. China is responsible for this whole mess, whether google is there or not there will exist censorship, and almost no human rights, especially the right of free speech.
I'm not saying Google can truly do no evil, I simply do not think they have done any evil here, not to merit the criticsm they have received for their actions at least.
Go ahead and call me unreliable; reliable is just a synonym for predictable.
Maybe this is a nit, but I always cringe when I see the media call the google philosophy "Do No Evil" as if it was some weird cross between a doctor ("do no harm") or a monkey ("see no evil").
Wasn't it always "Don't Be Evil"? As in don't be like Microsoft? (As in: "they shared secret windows APIs with the office team? oooh, that's evil.")
Please someone put my mind at ease on this one.
I'm not sure the market is all everyone is making it out to be. Just how many people have internet access, and of those people how many have the means to be consumers worth advertising to?
I meant Brin & Page... but you guys knew that.
This is the stance I think Google should take, continuing to provide service with China but allowing some "Filtering Hiccups" to occur.
Error reading device 'Signature'. (A)bort, (R)etry, (F)ail?
Sorry about the cut off reply - my point was going to be, should Google pull out of the U.S. if the US passes laws that undermine its citizens rights and freedoms? I'm not saying this is my positing, but some feel that the U.S. is become oppressive. If this were true, do you feel it is Google's obligation to pull out?
It is of course a question of scale. But I think it's remains squarely in Google's purview (and it's stake holders) to determin where it operates and why. It's not like there is a trade embargo in place to prevent them from operating there.
What galls me is that people will hold corporations to higher standards than their own government, whether local, state, or federal. Its PC to villify corporations and also no recourse against the public a corporation is easier to blame.
/. readers could not name their Representative or Senators without using Google. Hell even of the those who could the bulk of them would not know who is on the local school board, who their state representatives are, let alone the name of the county sheriff.
I would make a bet that three-fourths of
Its far easier to spout off on a message board about the evils of a corporation. Its a whole 'nuther matter to hold your own elected officials accountable or voice your opinion. Most would say "it doesn't matter, they don't listen" yet never adopt the same attitude with a corporation. Why is that? We don't elect corporations yet we hold them many times more accountable for their actions and usually actions which have no impact on ourselves.
Damn people, you have your priorities all backassward and worse you don't even care.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
Thier "make lots of money" motto will recieve priority over the lesser important "Do no evil" motto.
Before 1994, South Africa held the title of "most hated nation". Nations who persisted in trading with South Africa said that not to do so would disadvantage the poorest, mainly black, South Africans. Other nations ranted against South Africa whilst perpetrating their own heinous abuses of human rights.
..... where do they think the components for those boards are made?
Anyway, Google run their server farms on cheap motherboards
The unpleasant truth is that it's damned nigh impossible to avoid doing business with China one way or another. And if you do manage to avoid China, then you will end up paying over the odds for everything you buy, and be unable to compete in the marketplace.
Write to your Elected Representatives and ask them why we are allowed to import goods which have been manufactured under conditions which would not be acceptable in the destination country? It's all very well for countries such as Britain and the USA to have environmental, consumer protection and workers' rights laws; but when imported goods sidestep those laws, locally-produced goods become uncompetitive and the benefits that should have brought by those laws are lost. Something's got to be wrong when it's cheaper to fly a plane halfway round the world and back than to treat your workers like human beings.
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
I feel that there is a trend of executives selling out their values for the bottom line. The Enron folks were the extreme example of this but just about every executive has a conflict between the profit of his/her company and their own values at some point. Hypothetically, more engagement with China may bring about a trend of transformation to a pluralistic democracy with a free market economy. However, I am afraid that door swings both ways and we may be set on a course toward less democracy. Every executive loves the cheap labor that the Chinese provide thus relying less on an American workforce. A smaller American workforce means that any unions will have less power to influence a companies action. Thus, the lower and middle classes are losing power with businesses and democracy is diminishing. Now all that is left is the investors and the executives and if they are willing to help a government suppress and blind its people. Then, our future will be oppression and autocracy and our bottom-line don't look so good.
You don't have to be smart to use a Mac, you just have to be smart enough to buy one
The best approach is for Google not to self censor. Google should offer a Chinese language portal, and make the results as broad as the English language portal.
Should China's firewall decide to censor certain portions of the portal, or certain search terms, thats not a big deal; that's China's responsibility.
This means:
A) Google doesn't _really_ have to pull out; they just have to run their operations off-shore (from China).
B) Google doesn't have to actively work to circumvent Chinese law. That would be illegal. Rather, Google provides Chinese language search results to the whole world, and China is reponsible for filtering content at the ISP level.
C) Savvy internet users in China may be able to circumvent the law, similar to the way they current use proxies to get at unfiltered English language results.
This paints Google as a bastion of freedom, while still maintaining best-possible service in the Chinese language, and dumping all the responsibility of censoring to China's state-run ISPs.
WhiteWolf666 an exBush supporter. All you new-school,compassionate,save the children Republicans can rot in hell
There's a grey zone between good and bad. Somtimes, if you stick too much to being a goodie, someone else will take your place and be a real bastard.
In Google/China's case, MS might have wanted -and taken- the huge Chinese market.
What would have been the most evil case? You never know.
Nothing ever is completely good or completely bad.
And please leave the completely good/bad examples.
I hadn't the slightest objection to his spending his time planning massacres for the bourgeoisie... (P.G. Wodehouse)
I find this issue complicated by the right to self rule. The Chinese government might restrict freedom of the press and run a dictatorship but every nation has the right to self rule and if you want to go into China you must play by the Chinese rules. We would expect that of any person or company which comes into our country. What about Coke, Boeing, and the other major US/Western firms which have setup in China? Are they following Western labour laws? Western marketing laws? Western censorship laws? Google has become a lightning rod to this kind of criticism but they are not breaking any laws and other companies are abiding by the same rules without the criticism. So either you should complain about all the Western companies operating in China or none of them -- targeting Google as the lone bad guy seems a little unjust. And personally, I find those exploiting the lax labour laws to be far greater offenders of human rights and morality than Google. If your shirt says "made in China" maybe you should shutup now.
You must be kidding? Google will never pull out of China as Mr. Brin has commented on. Over time, everyone will forget and business will go one and Google will not throw the opportunity of the largest future economy in the world away.
You can check out the scale of the censorship for yourself (unless you're chinese ;)
e
Rest of world: http://images.google.com/images?q=tiananmen+squar
China: http://images.google.cn/images?q=tiananmen+square
I'd rather see google pull out than participate in such a blatant and upsetting removal of knowledge.
So lemme get this straight.. For all the Anti-Google people out there, cmon.. Evil, would be pulling out of China, and not letting the Chinese citizens have access to the greatest search engine of all time.. a modern day Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy.. Taking that away from the Chinese citizens would be evil indeed.. Google created their business right here in the good ol' USA.. Where they are free to run the business of their choice.. Certainly you cannot expect the same capitalistic freedoms in a country where the company wasn't created?? the Chinese are lucky enough to even have Google at all! stop blaming Google for christs sake.. imagine how pissed off the citizens would be if they were no longer allowed to use Google..
*plays the Apogee theme song music*
An official pull-out would just get them blocked.
Gradually eroding, or issuing a joint statement along with the rest of the world's tech giants are the best things Google et al can do there.
Both options would require serious dedication to work, but they're worth it.
Part of "Do no evil" means sticking to your priciples. If you don't stand by what you say, then you're integrety is tarnished. Once that happens people believe you just a little bit less. A corperation with a motto "Do no evil" is pretty rediculous anyway for one simple reason....
Define evil.
For one person evil could be not being 100% truthful at all times. After all "thou shall not lie"
For another evil is as long as noone gets hurt....and again, define hurt.
You see, that statement is entirely too open to interpretation to take it for anything other than it is...market speak. Why do we believe google saying something like that and we won't believe a politician who says the same thing?
I don't know about you, but I have a hard time believing ANY corperation who is responsible to stock holders. They aren't looking out for anyone's interest other than themselves and those stock holders.
If Google is not evil and China is, then it's just logical that they'd pull out. We wouldn't want a rift in the space-time continuum now, would we?
I don't know about that.
The thing is, uncomfortable engagement can be more effective than complete, self-satisfied and puritanical shunning. There's no end to what people will do to push back against those who shun them. In fact it becomes a useful explanation for every failure: the bad guys are out to get us. Think Castro.
Most of the time advocates of "constructive engagement" are just hypocrites who want to pay lip service to right and wrong. Google is not like that, I think, but it puts them in a sticky position. Some will fight them on moral grounds. Others will waffle in between. It's a messy and uncomfortable situation, whereas boycott is very clean and simple. The good thing about it is that it has the effect of making the party in question deal with the messiness, to explain and justify itself over and over. They'll spin, adjust, tweak and struggle to find some kind of comprimse that will square the circle. It's never enough to make them decide to take their ball and go home, but it never ends either. It'll be a continual embarassment. When the elite travel overseas, there'll always be a moment of uncomfortable silence when they talk to somebody while that person tries to figure out a way to navigate around the proverbial elephant in the room. Eventually, they may just decide it's eaasier to change than to put up with it. Think South Africa.
So, what I'm saying is it's a good thing that Google is involved with China, although it is not necessarily "good" in a moral sense. And at the same time it's also a good thing that China and Google are getting a PR hiding by people. If Google is forced out, let's hope it's after a long struggle. Then China and the paladins of human rights can start struggling over choice #2. Then #3, #4 etc.
It's an unappealing situation for the people involved, because it's messy. But messy is sometimes good. Keep it very nearly unbearably messy, but not quite. That's the ticket. Turn it into a tub of pig shit with a pot of gold at the bottom. Sooner or later they'll decide to quick trying to fish the pot out with a stick and muck out the shit.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
What if a company or country decided that we have too much freedom of speech, what if said country or company decided to, I dunno, not sell us any oil unless we started censoring ourselves, perhaps with regards to certain cartoons.
While we feel that spreading freedom of speech is a positive thing and a benefit and censorship is bad, other societies feel that spreading censorship is in fact a positive thing and a benefit and that freedom of speech is bad. This might be irrelevant to China since im sure most Chinese people want freedom of speech but in terms of international diplomacy and politics, where is this going to take us?
We do need to spread things like freedom of speech far and wide as safety against the 'upcoming' clash of civilisations but its hard not to think of this as pushing our values while we hate to have other peoples values pushed on us.
This comment does not represent the views or opinions of the user.
I said it before, and I am saying it again.
China has a right for censorship. It is a sovereign country.
I met many Chinese (I worked in academy and industry) and people who I talked to are very supportive of their "communist" government, even people from Taiwan or Hong Kong, not only mainland. The "communism" in China is not more than a label for a politically autoritarian, but economically liberal system (check Chile, Singapour and what not). This system works for Chinese.
Generalizing to the whole humanity the Western ideology is plain vanilla stupid irrational belief.
To each its own. Russia fell for this in the 90s and they paid high toll for the naivete of nascent freedoms in Russia.
There are also other players in the google.cn games: American government and Yahoo! (one of the founders is Chinese-American, BTW).
Former one is undoubtedly interested in hindering the freightening Chinese economical growth, and the latter is definitely interested in tainting its major search engine competitor.
I do not believe in karma. "Funny"=-6. Do good and forbid evil. Yours, Oft-Offtopic Flamebaiting Troll.
BBC Reports: China 'blocks' main Google sitet m
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/5055170.s
I wonder if this has anything to do with Brins comment..
I'm a little tired of this constant false distinction between what's good for business and what's moral or ethical. The way I see it, what's moral or ethical is just so *because* it is good for your survival in the longest, broadest consideration of things.
I like to use a swimming analogy. We're all in an infinite sea, with no shores and no bottom. To stay afloat (alive), you've got to do something that keeps you from sinking. The obvious answer here is "swim!", but consider that you could also hang off of a couple other people, or if you've got dense enough masses of people around, climb on top of them and get yourself clear out of the water. In this analogy, swimming is doing anything good and productive that keeps you afloat. A lone swimmer not near anyone else would be like a subsistence farmer. Helping those who can't swim, holding them up (so long as you're not drowning yourself), is doing a supererogatory deed, going beyond the call of duty to do good. Hanging off of other people is bad (though their helping to keep you up is good), and walking all over them is clearly bad.
But why are those things good or bad? Simple: if everyone were to hang off of everyone else, and nobody was swimming, we'd all drown. Morals are by definition meant to be universal codes of behavior, so something is immoral if and only if, if everyone were to do that, the results would be bad. It follows from this that the only reason anyone ever does anything immoral is because they're being short-sighted: walking all over people seems good for you in the short term, but in the big picture you're giving yourself a small gain at the expense of an overall greater loss across the whole mass of people, including yourself. If everyone were to do that you'd be screwed; the only reason it seems good at all in the short term is by virtue of all those hard-working swimmers you're walking over.
The thing I don't quite get is that, while humans have an excuse to be short-sighted since the shit quite often won't hit the fan within their lifetime, corporations are potentially immortal and so I'd think that they would be the longest-planning, most moral entities around, looking out for the economic well-being of the world. In some sense they are, with the pervasive pressure from above for the working class to work harder, but the strongest leadership is by example, and the more people and corporations we have making it rich by riding over others, the more the next generation is going to avoid working if at all possible to try and be a rich corporate executive and/or shareholder instead... and then, once enough people are resting comfortably on the shoulders of a few exhausted swimmers, they'll all drown; or at least, once those swimmers drown, or throw the fatasss freeriders off, they'll all have to start swimming again.
I guess the answer is that corporations are still being run by humans, which are usually short-sighted creatures, and who don't care if their corporations die eventually so long as it makes them rich in the short term. But maybe, to bring it back on topic, some people aren't so short-sighted and want to do something that will last beyond their own lives. I know I certainly do; to establish an enduring legacy, make some long-lasting positive impact on the world, is the closest thing to immortality anyone can achieve. Maybe the folks in charge of Google want that too. And they've actually got an opportunity here to do so. So don't discount all claims of morality out-of-hand by saying that they're only driven by profit. It can be both, and must be both if you're looking at the longest long run, which all of these immortal corporations ought to be doing.
-Forrest Cameranesi, Geek of all Trades
"I am Sam. Sam I am. I do not like trolls, flames, or spam."
... months ago and honestly I can't remember where. One of the major rags like Business Week or Wired.
Anyway, in short it noted that Google, along with MSN and Yahoo (both of whom have also "cooperated" with the Chinese government), have taken the policy of what I'd call accretive decensorship; that is, they are all starting from the position that some things (many things, indeed) must be censored, the Chinese government does not have a master list of what words or phrases must be censored ("Falun Gong" and "Tiananmen Square Massacre" would certainly be a couple), and therefore they all start with a default position of testing the limits of governmental censorship. In other words, you basically do what you want until Beijing throws the hammer down and throws you in jail and/or shuts you down, which happens frequently. Basically they're sitting there watching traffic and will arbitrarily decide which search terms are acceptable and which are not. A Chinese political blogger was put up as an example as someone who ranted for several months but was eventually shut down by the government.
Users in the West have a skewed perception I think of how "evil" Google is being here because the Chinese themselves have grown accustomed to this kind of censorship--not that this is right, per se, but by Chinese standards even a little bit of permissiveness by the government is considered wholly revolutionary. Basically Google, MSN, Yahoo, Baidu, etc. are dancing on a tightrope of what is and is not acceptable content according to the government. This is what I mean by accretive decensorship: Either by the action or inaction of the Chinese government and the action of western business forces like Google there will be a slow and steady decensorship of content. Google is playing a cautious game that all western business must play if they want to make inroads into the world's most explosive economy.
I think people (Americans in particular), need to rid themselves of the delusion that everything that is not "fair" must be opposed in full at every turn. Most often, committing the lesser of two evils is a good thing.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
Well the story we got in China today was quite different....
404 error. Server stopped responding. Blah blah generic (but obvious) "Great Firewall" block.
Google.com and gmail were down sporadicaly all day. My company is currently talking to google about training, i would have loved to have been in that office today watching them flip. Beijing will make you respect their power, if google doesnt want to play nice alibaba, yahoo, MSN and many others will. Remember that companies are not run by public opinion, they are run by stockholders - if I owned google stock i would be furious if they werent doing everything tay could to corner China.
Also of note I saw a message that all of our favorite proxy hosts have been busted by the great firewall as of today (on some news service). I havent bothered to check myself but tey were explicitly named and it was pretty obvious that it was just a matter of time. Good thing there are alternatives...
---- The real Slashdot is still here. You just have to browse at -1 to read the comments.
Did google do the right thing is changing is buisness practices to do business in china?
The problem is what is the right action on googles part in this situation. If you look at the issue of ethical company practices, it is correct for a company to follow the laws of the country that its doing business in.
But in this case the law has to do with censorship and freedom of speech. Each culture has its own perspectives on freedom of speech. Even in the US, speech is not completly free (libel, slander, media gatekeepers, political correctness, hate speech).
China has its own ideas of what free speech means. Sure many people in the US and Europe dont agree with it. But at the same time, there hasnt been a revolution in China to change that. Its not Google's or any corporations job to change that. They are responsible to thier shareholders and responsible for following the law where ever they do buisness. Free speech in China will come, when the people of China want it.
In America we are imprisoned by our fear of them.
Agreed.
Human curiosity coupled with awareness that information is being kept back is a powerful force. Personally, I initially thought Google did the right thing when launching the search engine for the Chinese market.
To me, I started doubting the usefulness of Google's strategy only while watching that documentary about the Tank Man that somebody linked to here a while ago. Realizing that many Chinese actually thought it was the government's job to protect them from bad information kind of took the premises away from Google's logic for me.
Not that I blame them, they're after all only people, too.
Google has only claimed "do no evil" as their motto. They never claimed to be a global Robin Hood, fighting to right every single wrong under the Sun.
Basically the world isn't made of just two extremes. (Nor even a good-neutral-evil, trio that you may have learned from D&D.) The real world has shades and nuances, not just pure black and pure white.
Even if you see it unidimensionally, the it's still an axis, not just two points. It's possible to be at various points to the left or to the right of zero (e.g., just a little naughty, or just a little nice) without being either a paragon of pure blinding light or the prince of darkness. And that applies to Google too: they just promised to not go into negatives on that axis, not to be the holiest Champion Of Light, Liberator Of The Serfs, Overthrower Of Tyrants, Righter Of Wrongs, and Avenger Of All Injustices.
But the RL isn't even that unidimensional and clear cut. Most RL actions aren't clear cut and obviously good or evil. A lot of them are a mixed bag of good stuff _and_ bad stuff, and stuff that's just personal opinion, or stuff that you have no fucking clue whether it really is good or really is evil. Or stuff where if you asked 100 different people, you'd get 101 different views.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Got any credit cards? Hmmm.. file taxes lately? What about your everyday shopping, or regular use on the internet.
Your government already has a ton of info on you, especially if you live in the US. And any info they don't have, they could easily get from any number of companies you've done business with. The police for example can get a ton of info on you from any number of places if need be. You wouldn't believe how much data retailers hold on to.
I don't know why you're so pissy over google complying to china, admitting they don't like the arrangements, but still provide some service to the people... with your argument you might as well hate any retailer in the US you've ever done business with, any student loan company you ever got money from, any credit card, bank, tax filing service, or the IRS its self.
Oh, and I'm sure the US government had a hand in making the IED videos on video.google.com "Not viewable in your country". I can't find any of the specific videos now, all the ones that listed that "warning" are no longer comming up in the video.google search. There are 3 that come up, but I'm guessing they'll be "filtered" sooner or later also.
Any self respecting geek would know full well that lawful and chaotic have little to no bearing on good and evil. Simply because those in power say "A", "A" doesn't automagically become benevolent. I'm guessing you don't tabletop, but if you do... REPORT TO YOUR DM IMMEDIATELY FOR RE-EDUCATION AND NOODLE WHOOPINS!
Well, this certainly makes my brain happy. Finally I can stop hating Google for aiding a communist regime and get back to hating them for being a capitalist empire that is soaking the working class dry with their ad-based system of profits!!! FUCK THE CORPORATE WORLD! POWER TO THE PROLETARIAT!
</joke>
Support the FairTax
For example, I have a good friend who's a Chinese citizen with US permanent residence (green card). She has lived in the US for years, and in England before that, but her (European) employer has her working in Shanghai at the moment, so she gets to experience China's network policies with the perspective of years of experience with Western unfiltered net access.
Her opinion on all this: "I don't want to use Google to look up political stuff and google.cn is a lot faster from over here." She says for the stuff she actually searches for on a day-to-day basis, she basically never sees the "this list is filtered to comply with local laws" message.
Take that away and you've done what, exactly? Slowed down her Web surfing and not given her a single extra result on her searches. Hooray, you've just reduced the utility of the Internet for millions of innocent people! No evil there!
I think what Google did originally was exactly the best choice from both a business and a moral point of view.
ha
As a shareholder of Google, I don't believe the company's "halo" has any effect on their stock. The fact that they've had significant growth and continue to have significant growth is probably the factor. As for pulling out of China being the "non-evil" thing to do, that would be the same as seeing a crime happen and not doing any thing about it. Is that evil or not?
Google has a pronounced political bias, and they regularly censor sites they don't like, that are on a different point of the political spectrum, right here in these United States.
Maybe they're looking for an exit strategy that doesn't include admitting they lost in the China search engine market...
What is interesting to me, is the thought that pulling out could potentially do more good in China than staying out could have.
Consider this situation: Google abruptly ends service in China, replacing their main page with a brief message that says something like, "Google is halting search service in china because they are unable to comply with Chinese law." They could post this with no explanation, and then later they could post an explanation that gave their moral stance, with justification by example (I.E. Tiananmen Square). This would be blocked quickly of course, but if their original posting created sufficient mystery, maybe chinese would be inclined to research the issue, and I assume some would see the explanation, and be able to spread the word. Creating mystery is a good way to create awareness.
Being a popular search engine in China gets them more visibility than if they'd decided to stay out of China from the beginning.
However, maybe causing public unrest is amoral. Destabilizing the Chinese government is no good unless the people really have good idea of what they'd replace it with, how they'd do it, and if they'd really have the commitment to see it through.
The one of the Chinese government's roles is to protect people against themselves, and I think they do this fairly well. Are lack of political freedoms worth a revolution that could severely reduce the quality of life in the country? I imagine it would be much worse than Iraq, if the leadership fell.
I confess to being a google apologist/fanboy/whatever. I think only the innocently idealistic would found a company with the corporate slogan "do no evil". I don't think their self-censoring presence in china is amoral.
I don't really believe in morality. It's just another banner for people to wave to justify their actions.
I believe in trying to be good and in reflection on past actions, but I don't believe in the condensing good down into general principles. People make rules, and they turn off their brain.
And you can talk about short-term consequences of your actions, and you can talk about long term consequences, but human lives are short when taken into the life of all humanity, and we haven't reached any sort of conclusion where we can sit back and reflect on what was truely good, and what was truely bad. Maybe the Holocaust provided a terrible lesson that will stay in the cultural conscious and prevent possible future ethnic cleansings. And so it would be good. It could be both good and bad.
Damn, this is my most indugent, rambling post ever.
-------
Incite and flee.
As a shareholder, I think that it only makes good business sense for them to be evil.
EOM
Suppose I was an encyclopedia salesman (for those with the seven-digit user IDs, encyclopedias are like dead-tree versions of Wikipedia), and Iran objected to the encyclopedia I wanted to sell there. I then went and created a second version of the encyclopedia, in which the Holocaust didn't happen. Maybe my censored version even says "abridged" or "some entries censored" on it somewhere, but it doesn't say what got removed. I then offer both for sale in Iran, knowing full well the Iranian government will block the sale of the uncensored version. Would that be evil? Hell yes.
This is exactly what Google is doing (except replace the Holocaust with the Tiananmen Square Massacre).
If Google pulls out of China, what about Dr.KaiFu-Lee ? Is he relocating to Redmond ;-)
So I figured that the best thing over all would be to trade with China, hoping to get the Chinese citizens more wealthy, who would then start demanding more freedoms from their government.
Then again, what do I know, this isn't a game of Civ.
--Rob
Towards the Singularity.
... than to procreate some inter-species Google-China love child.
Web 2.0 == Giant Blogspam Circle Jerk
Recall that it was possible to observe that the results were filtered when Google went live in China. Maybe Google considered the possibility that providing limited access for a while then later withdrawing on moral grounds would inspire the Chinese people to push for more access to information. Presumably before Google was available, fewer of them had an idea of what they were missing.
Repressive governments can only succeed as long as people are kept in the dark and kept from organizing.
An company founded in a free country (US, Canada, most of Europe, parts of South America, Japan, India, etc) should not tolerate oppressive policies when it does business in other nations. A company that supports censorship in other nations, while enjoying freedom in it's own is totally unacceptable. A company that exploits forced prison labor camps in China to boost profit margins while enjoying the protection, wealth, safety and freedom in a free country is totally unacceptable. Contracting with company to produce your product that pays young men and women an amount of money that is not very much, even in their poor country (Indonesia), while enjoying a country that has minimum wages laws and child protection laws is completely unacceptable.
A company is not an soulless entity that has no responsibility to humanity. Corporate law requires that board members exist, and in most nations those board members have be to living breathing human beings. Those who vote to determine the direction of a company have a responsibility to other human beings, and should try and hold other governments and companies in other nations to the similar standards that they are held to in there own country. I am willing to accept compromises. Like you can't pay people in Indonesia $4.75/hr (US minimum wage), when that amount of money has significantly more buying power there than it does here. But you could at least pay people an amount that allows them to buy food for their family, pay for a place to live and send their children to school.
Nobody is going to force you to be a human being and respect others and treat them fairly. And legally a corporation has little responsibility outside of bringing their shareholders a return on their investment. But I think it's certainly reasonable for everyone to expect/em decent behavior out of other people and hence out of corporations. When did acting cold and soulless become the default position, and being compassionate become the extraordinary position?
True Google is no Nike, but supporting censorship (either in China or the in US) does not really point in a positive directions according to my own moral compass. And I expect of all people living in a free country should find government censorship of politically unpopular ideas to be reprehensible.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
I would just like to recommend one small change... in your sig, actually:
--
for(r=0;allbase.size()>r;r++)
if(allbase[r].belongto==you)
allbase[r].belongto=us;
(anything below here is my own sig)
--
Well, is it better to sell an encyclopedia that has no entry for "Holocaust" or sell no encyclopedias at all? (I'm assuming that the encyclopedia doesn't say it never happened, just doesn't mention it) Also, you have you considered that no encyclopedia is complete, and all of them suffer through edits and changes (yes, this especially includes wikipedia). Basically, if you don't sell the encyclopedias, you're useless to the Iranians. If you sell crippled encyclopedias (that mention the censoring) some people might wonder "I wonder what my government has to hide?", and others will still benefit from the rest of the information contained in the encyclopedias. So what I'm asking you is this: would you rather have information you know is incomplete or no information at all?
You are reading a copy of my copyrighted post.
I heard one of their spokesmen put the case that given a choice between Google being banned, and google giveing censored results with a note on them saying "this was censored", it seemed that the latter might be more helpful to the cause of freedom in China, and I can't help but think that there was something in that point.
Another important point to remember is that they censor their results in other countries as well, for example France and Germany.
~~~~~ BigLig2? You mean there's another one of me?
google.se is still censored, in views of pornography in googles image search, without the ability to disable this. google.com still works, and you can make that not filter you search, but still.. we have no anti-pronography-laws here, so i don't see the point.
The U.S. is not perfect (voting citizen speaking here) but it is damned good.
You can insult the President, swear at the VP and still go home to your family. Try that in another country.
While the U.S. is slowly dying, it has been a wonderful place. Sadly the Republic turned into a Democracy and finally now into Lawyer and Mob rule. Sad days are ahead but looking back, we have changed the world. Slavery, woman's rights, equality, free speech.....thanks to a bunch of rebels in boats.
>After making such statements, they
... but I suspect Google knows. And I suspect they knew what their plan was before they tipped over that first domino. Maybe they're on the "outs" with the Chinese Gov't as it is, or maybe half of their staff threatened to resign, or mabye...it doesn't matter. Look for Google to do *something* and expect them to make a big event of it.
> have no choice but to pull out now.
I agree with this statement, but not necessarily the sentiment.
Yes, barring some strange/unlikely "compromise" with the Chinese government, Google has few viable alternatives at this point. They will have to retrench, modify (or reduce/eliminate) their service offerings *significantly* very soon. From a PR standpoint alone, they've locked themselves in to (at the very least) some *big* changes in the near future...
They're committed to *something* now because they've merely done what George Bush never will -- admit that yes, maybe/possibly somebody goofed. Maybe we made a mistake.
Willing to re-evalulate their decisions, and if necessary, admit fault -- check. Okay, well, the CEO of Google is now officially more moral/ethical than the leader of the Free World. (Big surprise there, right?) But while George may be stupid, his advisors aren't -- and there's a reason they avoid mea culpas.
George doesn't believe in Global Warming -- and for this, we call him *stupid*. That's a big jump down from what we'd be calling him ("evil bastard who is intentionally trying to kill the planet," perhaps?) if he'd ever admitted (at the very least) "well, this shit might be possible, I guess..."
This is because that in order to "admit that the potential for evil exists," you have to first be aware of said potential...and once you're aware of it, you're obliged to go "check it out," one way or the other. In science and politics, this can be done via an investigation, or a scientific study, etc. But Google isn't dealing with *facts* here; they're dealing with ethical dillemas. No "study" is going to demonstrate to the public that "No worries, we checked it out, and it turns out that it's *not* evil now!"
But I don't mean to paint Google as some poor frightened puppy that has wedged itself into a corner -- Google may be "stuck" with very few options right now, but the folks at Google are a smart lot. The CEO didn't just "offhandedly" say something by accident -- he's a smart guy, he knows what what he's doing, and he knew damn well that (by suggesting Google might be rethinking the matter) he was tipping over the first domino and setting into motion an irrevocable chain of events leading to....?
What will Google do? I have no idea
Whether its to make a point, or to make a buck, or to just whore up some media attention -- and regardless, good for them! -- they're going for something very public here, IMO, and it should be fun to watch as the drama unfolds.
I'm not an American, jackass. The fact of the matter is that Google still ended up censoring China.
"Well! At least it's better than killing them!"
Google is filtering based on company founder ideology even to the extent of not acknowledging USA Memorial Day whilst acknowledging many lesser known anniverseries.
...
See: From: http://newsbusters.org/node/5580
Quote:
NewsBusters reader Mr. Snuggles has pointed out something conspicuously absent from Google's various pages today - any reference to Memorial Day.
I'm sure most Googlers are extremely aware of how Google will dress up its logo at its web search or news pages in honor of holidays or special occasions. Google has been known to do this on Halloween, Valentine's Day, Christmas, etc. In fact, here is a display of all the Google holiday logos so far this year, and since 1999. You'll even find that Google celebrated Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's birthday just a week ago. For those scratching their heads, he created Sherlock Holmes.
I guess they were caught red handed...
Google is as Google does.
It is what it is.
And here IT is
http://tinyurl.com/eslxh
http://tinyurl.com/nplpx
Uh? they weren't denying censoring searches, it was written in plain text (chinese though) on the frigging result pages.
So the communist Chinese government never did anything bad, either, as long as they admitted to it? Interesting criterion.
If "censorship of terms like 'democracy' to the world's largest communist country" isn't an "evil" thing for an information company to do, then what is?
If tomorrow my own country decided to start filtering information, I'd be hella glad if Google kept on feeding me with (filtered) search result if it told me that the results were filtered.
Yeah, and there's the problem. By filtering results, they're helping the Chinese government maintain censorship. They're doing something bad, but so subtly that people might not even notice.
If they had made every search coming from a *.cn domain say "CENSORED" over the entire page, people would stand up and take notice -- and maybe do something. Keeping a ruled people complacent doesn't help anybody, except (in the very short-term) their abusive government. If I knew somebody in a relationship as bad as that, I'd tell him/her to leave the bastard/bitch.
Nice try though. Plus, it could be argued that the wording in your linked page was on their American website, while the censoring occurs on their Chinese webpage. Then, as a previous poster stated, right on the Google.cn results page, it lets you know if there are any results that have been censored.
i ew/
What are you talking about? Google.cn censors without notifying users that content is being removed. For example...
Here's a Google.com search for "tiananmen"
http://images.google.com/images?q=tiananmen
Here's a Google.cn search for "tiananmen"
http://images.google.cn/images?q=tiananmen
creepy huh?
Frontline did a piece about this a few months ago. It was called "The Tank Man" and it's viewable online.
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/tankman/v
Watch part 6, "The struggle to control information." A journalist hands a picture of the tank man to several Chinese university students, and they have -no- idea what the picture is about. That's crazy.
"Things are more moderner than before- bigger, and yet smaller- it's computers-- San Dimas High School football RULES!"
In a country where people can just mysteriously disappear for having different political views who the hell would care if their website was taken out of a search engine.
Show me one CHINESE person in CHINA who cares about this? None? oh right..
Damn, that's a good one. And my mod points just expired.
With the technology they've been forced to share (and who knows what level of industrial espionage they've exposed themselves to), Google's big brother incarnation in China will persist, whatever corporate decisions taken at this point.
One problem with your analogy. The censored encyclopedia would actually have an entry for "The Holocaust". And the text of that entry would be something to the effect of "we're sorry, but we're not allowed to tell you about that". (Which frankly, would lead some people to wonder why, and find some other means of finding out about it.)
I really don't see the problem with that. What have you taken away from the people that they did not have before? If I have 2 apples, and I give you one, I've done something nice. If I have 2 apples, and I do not give you one, I have not necessarily done something mean.
Software sucks. Open Source sucks less.
Google must stay in China continue to curtail civil rights and help track down unbelievers. The Death Ray must not be allowed to become rusty with disuse.
If they do pull out, that will seriously damage their claim to being
the New Evil Empire...and might give Microsoft another chance at the
title. Government collusion and bullying others are required
attributes for any good, sorry EVIL, Evil Empire.
Cheers,
(not an anonymous coward, just a lazy lurker...)
CG Anderson
BLOG: Musings and Meanings on NonSensical Events and Canada
http://ahablogolicious.blogspot.com/
Google is a dual-class stock -- founders hold one class, and everyone else holds the other common class.
Seattle Post Intelligencer: Google does IPO its own way: "To insulate themselves from outside pressure, Page and Brin are creating a two-class stock hierarchy designed to give them effective veto power. The company is selling Class A common stock to the public, but Page and Brin will control Class B stock, which will have 10 times the voting power."
Google's Class A common stock, the shares you and I can buy, has reduced voting rights relative to founder stock. A single Class B founder's share vote is the equivalent of 10 shares of Class A common. So already, the founders have tremendous say in what Google does, to an extent that isn't true of most other public companies.
Further, the majority of Google's stock is held by the founders.
This fact, combined with the 10x voting weight given to founders' shares, means that Google is insulated from Wall Street to an unusual degree. No block of shares held by outsiders, even by large institutional investors, can force Google to do something that the founders do not agree with.
This isn't to say Google is immune from the stock market. The founders' net worth certainly depends on the stock price. But again, Google's corporate direction is unusually strongly tied to what its founders want, rather than what an institutional investor or other common stockholder wants.
--Pat
Yahoo would be very happy with Google pulling out. Less competition in that very important market!
It's easy to admit you did something bad after the first few large paychecks for compromising your beliefs. I'm sure that pile of cash will soothe their guilt over the decision.
This cynicism feels good and sounds good. But doesn't reflect the world of publically held companies. To admit that a decision was less than ideal or even bad, but still made money opens you up for problems. Investors and shareholders are a finnicky bunch. If you start giving them an indication that you might reverse a positive financial situation they get skittish. Particularly if it means you might not make those same decisions in the future. Shareholder lawsuits at least seem to be less uncommon these days.
My Suburban burns less gasoline than your Prius.
I have heard for a number of years about the idea that American (or other foreign, for that matter) companies will be able to open new markets and profits by selling their products (whether they be tangible goods or IP) or services in the People's Republic of China because they represent an "almost untapped market of new customers." But does this really hold true, especially for IT companies?
In the seventeen years I have worked in the IT industry (mostly at companies which sold software, but also for a hardware vendor) I have seen varying degrees of interest in selling products in China. For example, in the late 1980s through early 1990s, I worked at McAfee Associates, which even then had a fairly global presence due to marketing the product as shareware. We had never had any sales in China and, as a matter of fact, would regularly receive copies of our own anti-virus software from which our copyright and contact information had been removed and replaced with messages saying it was from the Ministry of Public Security and to contact them if a virus was found. Of course, changing the messages in the software also set off its own anti-tamper checks for signs of damage/infection by a computer virus, so we received plenty of copies of our own software where the warning message had been edited as well and were infected by computer viruses. Still, it is very hard to sell a product in a country whose government itself is hacking and pirating the same software you are trying to sell. When Bill Larson took over the company from John McAfee he expressed a strong desire to sell products in China, but when I left in the mid-1990s there was still no sales coming in from over there, other than the occasional ex-pat who registered a copy of the software.
Strangely enough, the only company I've worked for which has had some success in China is a telecommunications manufacturer, who makes equipment like VoIP PBXs, phones and so forth. They have had a few wins over there and even have a small sales office in Beijing. I was always surprised they never had problems like Cisco did with Huawei. But that's just one company and sales from other countries in the region (Japan, Korea, Taiwan, etc.) outstripped those. I haven't worked there since last year, but I doubt things have changed much.
So, where are the foreign IT companies which are making money in China? Cisco may have had some success there in the past, but Huawei and their "Cisco-like" products look like they are to overshadow them, and services like Alibaba, Baidu and QQ in China are already servicing the markets that Western ecommerce, search and community/messaging have had only limited success in reaching.
RegardsAryeh Goretsky
Dexter is a good dog.
Google should be applauded for being one of the few companies that are willing to openly discuss their ethical standards. It is a pity that this leads to a lot of bad publicity for the company--ther are a lot of firms who act unethically (doing censorship for totalitarian governments, ...) yet manage to stay mostly under the radar.
where's all that Karma?
I think there are several reasons that people (and the people that run companies) do the wrong thing.
They don't see the long-term benefits of doing the right thing.
They mistakenly value short-term over long-term. (There's scientific data that shows that this is the case in general, even when it's clearly irrational.)
They're lazy.
All of these really come down to being short-sighted, or at least, to acting short-sightedly (i.e. one may realize that something will be of long-term detriment but the short-term benefits are overwhelmingly compelling). Either a lack of consciousness of a lack of willpower can bring this about. I know for me it's certainly the willpower problem most of the time... I'm acutely conscious that many things I do are shortsighted and wrong, but can't seem to make myself do otherwise.
They don't think they'll get caught.
This one I don't think fits in though. Bad acts aren't just bad because of the consequences that arise from other people not liking them. They're bad because they have consequences in an of themselves which, were it not for the good deeds of others counteracting them, would be bad for the actor. Polluting the environment is bad because you need the environment to be clean in order to survive; in small portions the effects may not be noticeable but nevertheless, if you did that a lot, or if a lot of people did that, there would be negative effects, regardless of whether anybody thought the act itself was wrong.
Sloth (as in excessive laziness, being an unproductive leech; not the good kind of efficiency-maximizing laziness) is bad because it depletes the resources you need to survive without producing any more. If everybody in the world were suddenly to stop working and rest on their asses and live off of what's already been produced - even if nobody thought that was wrong, if nobody thought stealing was wrong and people could just take whatever resources were out there - then we would still eventually starve to death, whether or not anyone thought the sloth leading to that situation was wrong.
Likewise, harming other people or society is wrong because you have a better chance of surviving in civilization (provided that civilization is not overtly hostile or dangerous to you in some way) than all alone out in the woods. Even neglecting the direct risk of assault that would arise if everyone were to disregard each other's well-being, even if it was only YOU harming other people, if you did it enough you would wind up destroying civilization, putting you all alone in the world; and while you may enjoy being away from other people (I know I certainly do), it's still better for you, in terms of your chances of survival, to have the safety net of society there, so long as society isn't perverted such that it's causing more harm to it's members than good.
Which segues nicely into the notion that the social harm and benefit thing goes even further than immediate benefits to you during your life. If you look at the trend of all of this, good behaviors are those which tend to perpetuate systems that behave in those ways, and bad behaviors are those which tend to terminate the systems that behave in those ways. It's really quite evolutionary: those patterns which reproduce, propagate, or otherwise perpetuate themselves will keep on going, and those that don't will fail. With simple biology the patterns are those which are dictated by DNA, and the systems which manifest those patterns in action are biological organisms. With sociology the patterns are the customs, traditions, laws, moral and ethical beliefs, and other sorts of behavior-guiding concepts of the people of a society, and the systems are the social organizations themselves.
So if you consider that all people must eventually die, it seems that if survival is the ultimate point of morality then there is no point, because you are going to die eventually no matter what. But if you look beyond your own personal survival, you can see that the patterns which const
-Forrest Cameranesi, Geek of all Trades
"I am Sam. Sam I am. I do not like trolls, flames, or spam."
I fail to see how Google operating in China is endorsing the Chinese government. If a Chinese company started operating in the US, would we say that the company endorsed the US government? Everything the US government does? The NSA spying on American citizens? The war in Iraq? What if it had to obey the law requiring it to help the NSA spying programs?
Software sucks. Open Source sucks less.
Once upon a time, there was a private company named Levi's that attempted to keep its clothing manufacturing in the U.S. long after every other "American" garment company was using cheap overseas labor. It cost them a lot, but it was the right thing to do.
At some point, their cheaper labels were being manufactured overseas. Turns out, the plant had children in their employ and much bad PR ensued. It was Levi's policy to not allow that.
But when they looked closer at it, they found that the kids would have been in much worse jobs (things like prostitution) had the clothing sweatshop not been there. So they instituded a policy that kids had to be paid the same as adults, could only work half time and the other half was going to school, all paid for by Levi's. The Haas family keeps their charitable contributions very private. And Levi's is privately held.
They were lauded in Europe and critisized in America.
Were they right? Were they moral?
You should never let your need to be morally pure get in the way of what's right. It's arrogance to take moral stands just so you "feel good" when people are suffering. Change is like flipping a bit. It must occur over time.
Google had many options; hell they could have purchased the current Chinese search leader, Baidu. Easily. But they didn't. Because it would not have allowed them to engage China head on, to build the relationships and influence the generation growing up in China who *will* change their country. Companies don't change governments. Neither do other governments. It's always the people. If you don't engage them, you have no chance of influencing them.
Everyone in China that needs information can get it. The Chinese firewall is trivial to circumvent and everyone who cares knows it.
Let things play out before judging. Especially considering that it's 99.9% probable that your computer is "made in China". And your clothes. And TV. So check the stability of your own moral high ground.
I came into this IT world on the coat-tails of Carl Friden and his 1151 macro arithmetic printer which I programmed and sold to the Bank of New Zealand for mortgage tables. I then moved to the Canon 164P in which addition and subtraction operated virtually instantly. From the Canola museum, "99999999 x 99999999 completes in about 300 milliseconds". Its 1 kbits of delay line memory combined with a punch card reader made it the ideal machine with which to clean up sales to 90% of university and scientific establishments. The unwritten rule in 1971 was that the salesman's job was to create the program needed to make the sale. When I was made national programming supervisor that job fell to me, on top of my own quota. A couple of years later, I was the first HP field engineer selling my homework programs to the science community. Teaching professors to program was part of my sales pitch. That background became useful when I adapted space-frame analysis to my 15 year MRP-II development. Global was a world famous commercial Wang 4GL system. As a side business with my managing director's contacts, I created a crystal ball called the Ingrid Thought Processor. I bought and wrote my own copyright over Patrick Slater's Ingrid. Professor Slater was Charles Spearman's student and was compelled to make Ingrid non-assumptive and scalable, using his highly modified PCA algorithms. Unfortunately my non-profit AI goals conflicted with my commercial goals and I was thrown off the wild horse. In retaliation, I shot the horse with a triggerless gun. The recoil took the wife, and the kid. The harmonics are still being felt today. The case of Google vs China being but one. My opinions should be not taken seriously in this thread, not because I want to blow my own trupmet but to inform the workings of today's Ingrid KarmaGun(tm), and its similarities to the Google core algorithm. I want to say more but I'd rather get back to my two dimensional programming world. I'm finishing Ingrid's new Sony Acid beater and am looking for a Reason 3.0 plugin. I must say that the "Google vs China" story is right up there, along with Theism vs Atheism, and other such contradictions like Project Monarch, etc. This story-in-the-making can only make survival sense in a supercomputing grid where there are several ontological interactions. It must also tell a story that encompasses the beginings of all other so-called competing stories. Only by becoming the oldest story ever told, including the reasons why the other stories started as lies, can the Real Matrix exist. The one writing this type of story must trace his roots to the original survivors. As a Guarani-Brit I can, and tell such a story that includes the future determinations of medical marijuana and an undiluted group of Atlantean survivors who turned out to be my neighbors. The story is not so much programmed as it is disected and rebuilt as a cybernetic soul. For this story to be believed then all the characters depicted must be allowed to see it too. At such a junction a new form of world power is born with a new form of human expression. Chapter 1 http://homepages.ihug.co.nz/~income/atlantis01.htm l
If anyone wishes to ask me more, on the internet - away from Slashdot
where my identity got pwned, I am known as Jimekus. Until then it pays
not to be talked about too seriously.
"Ingrid Beats Combing", so I'm off to code the speed of the tempo
slider to ten seconds.
Argumentum ad Probabilitum
Somebody surely needs to get over himself, Captain. Maybe 26 times.
How many beans make five, anyhow ?
I'd be surprised if many of the people here claiming to know what's in the Chinese peoples' best interest have a better than foggy idea of what real, actual Chinese people think about it. I think there's no more important perspective than that of the Chinese people, and I get kind of annoyed seeing people saying "the Chinese people don't want that" or "what the Chinese people really need is this", when I feel that they don't actually know, or probably really even care, what real Chinese people think.
I didn't say you were an American. I said people (particularly Americans). The parenthetical comment was for the benefit of Slashdot's readership, which does display the typical American delusion.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
Heck, they have a moonbase and a death ray Those are two prerequisites to being an Evil Genius. I mean, what diabolical megavillian doesn't have a moonbase and a death ray?
"I've spent my whole life figuring out crazy ways to do things. It'll work." -- Montgomery Scott, "Relics"
Yes and no. Absolutism, as in an absolute truth, does exist. The problem arrises when you try to define one.
Absolutely. Er... no pun intended.
I agree completely that it's incoherent to hold any notion that equates to "there is no [objective] truth". But I wouldn't say that believing that there IS an objective truth is absolutism. I'd reserve that term for any position which claims itself to BE the ultimate truth, denying the subjectivity of the authors and supporters of such a position.
In short, absolutism is the denial of subjectivity, while relativism is the denial of objectivity. A rational, empirical, philosophic, scientific approach can't do either of these: it must acknowledge the fact that there is an objective measure of reality (and, back on subject, morality too), while also acknowledging the subjectivity of any individuals investigating and deliberating such things.
I couldn't quite follow what you were getting at about standards outside the context of discussion... but this notion of having to combine objectivity and subjectivity in order to avoid absolutism or relativism is closely related to why reason and philosophy and science all rely on a combination of logic and experience, and why that just is the universal standard.
Logic is all about objectivity, and the only facts which can be stated with absolute certainty are, as you say, simple logical truths: "not (P and not P)" is absolutely true always and everywhere because it can't conceivably be false. Conversely, experience is entirely subjective. I can't share my experience with you like I can share logical propositions with you. At best I can give a rough description, and you can try to reconstruct that experience in your mind and compare it to experiences of your own. So experience can only be agreed upon by consensus, and as such it's a very relative thing.
But if you combine these things, and try to construct some logical, mathematical formulae as though they were absolute truths, in such a way that they explain your experiences, but always keep open to the possibility of further experiences invalidating those old theories and requiring new ones, and never relying on anything which is in principle beyond experience, then you should continually get closer and closer to the complete "absolute truth" - though until you've experienced everything (which is certainly infeasible if not logically impossible), you'll never actually get there.
And that's all that the scientific method is: you observe something, explain it with a theory, follow that theory to it's logical conclusions, and then look to see if those conclusions actually match your experience. Lather, rinse, repeat. All this can be derived just from noting the faults of both absolutism and relativism, and it can be applied to pretty much everything. So long as you take a naturalist position on ethics, such that ethical and moral facts just consist of some sort of facts about people and the world (and aren't some kind of weird, inexperiencable and non-logically-derivable "facts"), then it applies just as much to ethics, and can be used to compare and contrast ethical systems between cultures without resorting to imperial absolutism or cultural relativism.
-Forrest Cameranesi, Geek of all Trades
"I am Sam. Sam I am. I do not like trolls, flames, or spam."
You're absolutely right- that makes my sig much better. Thanks!
You are reading a copy of my copyrighted post.