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Google Sets Censorship Precedent In India
eldavojohn writes "Censorship varies from country to country but India, home to a sixth of the world's population, appears to be shaping up much like China. Not far behind everyone else, Google has increasingly censored websites with an incident where a very popular politician died and Google forcibly deleted and dissolved a group on Orkut where offensive comments about the Chief Minister of Andhra Pradesh were posted. An official from India's Ministry of Communications and Information Technology said, 'If you are doing business here, you should follow the local law, the sentiments of the people, the culture of the country. If somebody starts abusing Lord Rama on a Web site, that could start riots.' The lengthy opinion piece calls attention to the beginnings of a definitive lack of free speech online for Indian citizens. A spokeswoman for the 'Do No Evil' company explained, 'India does value free speech and political speech. But they are weighing the harm of free speech against violence in their streets.'"
If somebody starts abusing Lord Rama on a Web site, that could start riots.
Sounds like more of a culture problem than a Google problem there. I mean, is the west the only place where people can say "offensive" things without riots? And even then Islamic idiots try to kill them (look at the Danish cartoonist issue) when free speech is protected by law.
India needs to address this problem themselves by increasing free speech, not by trying to shut it down.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
Such as....? Most of the alternative search engines simply use a Google scraper to remove the privacy issues and deny Google any revenue from you using it. Lets see, I'd hardly say MSN/Live/Bing are non-evil being owned by Microsoft who has done more harm than good to the tech world, Yahoo! censors just as much if not more than Google, and I'm not entirely sure if Ask does or not but even assuming it doesn't I can never find any relevant results using it. Most other smaller search engines are either too small to give you a decent web search or owned by a large company (like how Yahoo owns AltaVista)
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
Trying to accommodate the demands of each foreign country's governments on a case-by-case basis in order to do business in their countries is an extremely dangerous game to play. You can rationalize away small losses of freedom as "fitting in with national conditions", but there is nothing to stop "fitting in" going all the way to directly supporting dictatorships and the worst kind of abuses of human rights.
When you don't have fixed principles, you have no principles at all.
Some will say "Google does have a fixed principle: to make money." The trouble is, that is not a principle about human rights, it's a principle that expressly allows human rights to be negotiated away. In effect, it's a principle to do evil against people in order to do well for profits.
Google needs to get its head sorted out before this starts to go really bad. Because it will.
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
Wrong. The DMCA and software patents certainly don't help matters, but that has nothing to do with the banking collapse (both of them...), the monopolization of the news media, the free reign of large corporations, etc. None of this is cause by active government interference, but rather, by the government ceding it's responsibility to regulate.
Wal-Mart's good PR, able to bring in shoppers with a whopping 12 cent discount was what got them into this position, but Wal-Mart is a monopoly today because its vast size has become self-sustaining. They can dictate prices and terms to their suppliers, and if they aren't happy, that disagreement may well single-handedly drive your company out of business.
Bull. The news media was much better at unbiased reporting in the past. Today, it's largely a token quote from both sides (no matter how factually incorrect one side's statement may be), and then back to whatever spin was desired...
There are only a few examples of propaganda you can possibly come up with, and it's a lousy comparison because such circumstances just don't exist today. There is no more Soviet Union, so we don't need the propaganda anymore. If you want to talk about modern wars, try comparing the news coverage of Vietnam and tell me we've got it so much better today...
Blatantly lying and distorting facts is NOT editorial. If it was, then you could can hide ANYTHING behind that label, with impunity.
That's completely baseless. There's nothing in existence to do this incredible job at filtering out the crap from the cream. With no filtering, it's he who yells the loudest, and that's what we see today... which explains Fox News quite succinctly.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
You don't need to censor that which people voluntarily reject or have no interest in. You censor that which people might be interested in seeing but which doesn't suit your purposes.
Quotes like this guy's "we should respect the laws of local countries" I don't agree with. Laws != Ethics. The correct extension of the principle of respecting other's values is "we should respect the wishes of the people of local countries". The people are not synonymous with their government and the more a government censors information from the people, the less synonymous with that government they are likely to be and the less reason we have to follow the dictates of a government that claims to represent them.
If information is uncensored, then people can choose to look at it / read it / think about it or not. If information is censored then they have only one option. Given that being able to choose the better option out of two functionally subsumes only having one of those choices without cost, then the logically better option is not to censor things.
Aide-toi, le Ciel t'aidera - Jeanne D'Arc.