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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."
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
We really need a Godwin's law for people who always bring up that a company is required by law to maximise profits or whatever.
If a company has policies that involve being moral, and the shareholders know this, then they can't sue them for following their own policies. As long as Google is open about their policies they won't get sued. If shareholders don't like their policies they can sell their shares.
Now if Google had a secret strategy that was lowering their revenues, then the shareholders can sue. But as long as they are open about stuff, they can do whatever they want.
The law is also very flexible about allowing a company to determine what "shareholder interest" is. A large number of shareholders are interested in stock price and dividends but there are people who determine their investments beyond stock earning power.
You mean the two majority shareholders, Sergey and Larry?
Perhaps, but remember that Brin and Page issued an "Owner's Manual" for their stock when it was issued, and that it was issued in two different classes. Class A stock has much lower voting representation than Class B stock (a ratio of 1:10 voting weight). Class B stockholders are the ones with real power to steer Google, and Google's Class B stock is tightly held. Brin and Page together hold 33% of the Class B stock, which is enough to ensure that they can direct the company.
The Rise and Fall of Online Community
... 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.
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.
You mean like this? (Which is not the same thing as this.)
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.
Funny, I don't notice a date anywhere on your linked page, so how can we determine that Google had this on their site while censoring searches? In-fact, I went to that webpage, and this is what it currently says:
r =17795&topic=368
Does Google censor search results?
It is Google's policy not to censor search results. However, in response to local laws, regulations, or policies, we may do so. When we remove search results for these reasons, we display a notice on our search results pages. Please note: For some older removals (before March 2005), we may not show a notice at this time.
http://www.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answe
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.
You might be looking only at Class A shares. There's also a Class B.
Anaesthetica posted earlier describing the stock situation at Google.
Sergey and Larry did not relinquish control when they floated Google stock.
Sorry to burst your bubble, but had you bothered to translate the Google.cn page you linked to into English, you would see that they do infact notify their users that results have been removed.
a ges.google.cn%2Fimages%3Fq%3Dtiananmen&langpair=zh -CN%7Cen&hl=en&ie=UTF8
http://www.google.com/translate?u=http%3A%2F%2Fim
As shown in the (admittedly shitty) translation:
" According to local laws, regulations, and policies, not part of the search results show."
Babelfish shows the exact same thing, although you'll have to do that yourself since it appears I cannot link directly to a translated page like I can with Google.
So, with that in mind, how is Google censoring results without notifying their users, when it clearly says right on the page that results have been removed?
Google does tell the users that the results are cencored. They even got blasted by the state ran media in China for doing so. (it was by XingHua I think...
Right at the bottom of the page is this a rough translation is "according to local law and policies, some parts of the search results will not be shown".
regarding the video you posted, yes, ofcourse not a lot of students in China can be exactly sure what that picture is about, since they probably never seen it before. But that does not prevent them from knowing about the '89 masacare that took place. Some bad translation was in the video, somewhere after 1 min, the narrator says "the boy said 89","but the girl made no connection". However when the boy said 89 in Chinese, the girl actually answered "probably" in chinese. A few words makes a huge difference. It shows how students in China does know about this issue, even thou it never comes up in Chinese media.
Also, most Chinese does not want to do anything that will provoke the government. I don't know much about the backgrounds of the interview, but if a foriegn interviewer came to me to conduct an interview, asking me things that is very much sensitive to the government, I would just pretend to know nothing, since the governement could easily come the next day and expell me from the university without giving a valid reason. So in this interview, it is distinct possibility that the students might have guessed it was the 89 masacare, but pretended to not know about the issue, just so that they wont have to deal with the government.
Slavery was abolished in the British Empire by 1838; it was not abolished in the US till 1865. Women had the right to vote in New Zealand from 1893; in the US it was not until 1920 (with legislation at a federal level overturning territory legislation as late as 1887. Desegregation is associated with the US because segregation was...
Don't fool yourself: America had some early innovations, but has been very conservative ever since. It's what happens when you teach yourselves you're perfect already.
Look out!
FWIW, mainland Chinese people don't use the word "Tianenmen Square" to refer to the massacre. They call it "6-4", which stands for June 4, 1989. Here is what a search for 6-4 looks like in Chinese.
I think it's wrong that the Chinese government censors these searches, but I also believe that the perfect is the enemy of the good.