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Behind Google's Recent Decision About China
yuhong writes "This article by The Independent takes a look at what is behind the recent decisions made by Google regarding China, particularly regarding Sergey Brin, born in the USSR, [and whose origins] played a big part in this decision. From the article: 'He's always had an emotional tug within him, saying "we shouldn't be making compromises," says Ken Auletta, the author of Googled: The End of the World As We Know It.'"
Standing up to China takes stones. Having said that, I am more and more afraid that they'll own all of us in my lifetime anyway.
I don't give a damn for a man that can only spell a word one way.
Mark Twain
This article by The Independent takes a look at what is behind the recent decisions made by Google regarding China, particularly regarding Sergey Brin was born in the USSR which played a big part in this decision.
Interesting, Sergey's father faced the problem of having to compromise by abandoning his faith and culture in order to get the job he wanted (astronomer) or stay Jewish and be reduced/stunted in a select set of careers. Now Sergey has a similar decision where he can choose either his principles or a chance at one sixth of the world's population as a market. Should be an interesting choice.
I hope he realizes that once he cashes in the choice will no longer be his and will be a painfully obvious one for the investors. Capitalistic greed, while much less worse than flaws of implemented Socialism, has its evils too, Sergey.
My work here is dung.
So Brin wanted to pull out of Russia and his colleague(s) wanted to be evil?
Looks like Brin lost. No wonder he is selling out(stock).
If only they would have stood up for free speech at the beginning, and not only after they found themselves with a disappointing 29% market share.
Not even in the face of Armageddon.
-- Rorschach
Google has no chance competing against Baidu.
If I want to watch the latest episode of "Family Guy", I simply go to Baidu type it in and within a minute I am watching.
With Google... What is this garbage? I don't want to read about family guy I want to watch it.
Until the Intellectual Property issues are resolved, Google has no chance in China.
if google wants to start a campaign to promote democracy and human rights in china on all websites in the world, forcing the people's republic to censor the whole world, effectively re-isolating themselves, they can do it. if they want to take another strategy, and make all of google inacessible from all of china, imposing some isolation on them, they also can. they can pressure other organizations to do the same. but continuing to play footsie with capitalism and fascism and maoism and government monopolies and expect good results is going to continue getting nothing. at worst, google would lose china, at least while that government continues, but gain a lot of respect in the rest of the world.
Build your own energy sources from scratch. http://otherpower.com/
I've set all 250 computers in my Dept. default search engine to Google. I think Evil is just a part of human nature and it takes real effort to not be evil. I applaud Google for standing up to China and forsaking monetary gains for purity of ideals.
I am a stern opponent to anything communist/socialist in nature, being born and raised until the age of 16 back in the non-existent USSR. I am also against this buddy-buddy system, that apparently all of these so called capitalist societies have. There is no principled system anywhere, in the 'communist' countries, it's basically a dictatorship and no free enterprise is allowed to compete with it, because there is no competition, the planned economy is doomed. In the so called 'capitalist' countries now it is all about buying power in the government to push forward agenda of getting free money printed by the government.
Hong Kong seems to be the place where the society came as close as possible to the real free market system, money is created by private entities, there are competing currencies, government can't dilute the value and give preferential treatment to certain corporations, banks, etc. You don't like what one monetary system is doing, move your business to another. I am sure it has its problems, which I am not aware of, since I never lived there, but it seems to be the best out of everything I have seen or hear of so far.
I am not surprised that Brin is the guy who takes the principled stand and I would not be surprised to find out that he came up with the 'no evil' slogan. It's obviously going to be a losing battle, if we know anything about people, they'll fuck up anything until it's dead, look at HP, they used to be the 'no evil' company of engineers. I just remembered the horror stories connected to a professional firm jumping shark-ceo type, Fiorina was her name?
That's the problem, we can't live forever, so our principles die with us and there is nothing much we can do past that to promote our ideals. We try, but looks like we fail in all cases, that's too bad.
Good luck to Brin in this battle, I don't know that even his crazy fortune can fight off this one for too long and I don't know how interested he will be in that once enough pressure is applied from enough people interested in profit motive only.
You can't handle the truth.
The compromise that Google made with China was agreeing to Chinese censorship in exchange for China's protection from privacy invasion beyond that allowed by the laws Google agreed to follow. Then Google saw that protection was either useless against Chinese hackers, or betrayed by the Chinese government itself (or both).
When you pay the mafia for "protection" but you get broken into anyway, you stop paying the mafia. If you can. We'll see whether Google is tougher than China's mafia government.
--
make install -not war
Or they think it's a car thief.
The family lived with Michael's mother in a small, three-room apartment in Moscow
OMG!!! People were living 3 people in a room at that time. WTF?!
If China rips off the iPod, Apple will know. They can buy and dismantle a knock-off, dump the ROMs, and prove that they have been ripped off. In Apple's case they can also lock down iTunes, or just rake in the iTunes revenue from the rip-off product users, but other manufacturers don't necessarily have that option.
If China rips off Google Search, Google will not know, or not be able to prove it, since all the code will be on a server in China.
So, if Google got wind that their Chinese employees were ripping off their code, that's a big deal. Big enough to pull out of China?
particularly regarding Sergey Brin was born in the USSR which played a big part in this decision.
Holy shit, can we please proofread summaries before submitting stories? How the hell did you people pass high school English?
I like to think of online DRM as something akin to a college -- you pay for lessons until you learn something.
Could these actions have been all started by Google's largest competitor Microsoft? I mean it's not out of the realm of possibilities to think that MS would love to have the Chinese market all to themselves, by having a back room deal with the Chinese Govt to target Google.
There are no loopholes. It's either legal or it's not.
Because in Soviet Russia, China censors Sergey Brin....
It's scary to read all of the comments from people who have never lived under an actual oppressive government about how the US is just as bad as China ...
It's not scary, it's the sign of a healthy system. If you have a population of over a million and no one is complaining about the leadership than something is terribly terribly wrong.
I will always have comments to criticize my government with and I will decide how loudly I voice them. You are correct in asserting that China is worse on censorship than the US but that won't stop people from drawing analogies to prevent the equivocation from being complete. The fact that a North Korean or Iranian or Chinese citizen cannot get up and loudly voice criticisms (no matter how true/untrue) of their respective governments is what should scare you.
I assure you that we know it's not as bad here but some of us feel that any mild form of censorship is horrible. And so you'll hear it from time to time and that's just a sign that the system that allows dissent is working. If I didn't have that to bitch about, trust me, I'd find something else. It was literally designed that way by our founding fathers and is the American Way*.
*Note: I'm not saying it was started by or is exclusive to Americans, just that it's how we expect it to be.
My work here is dung.
As such, he and his ancestors have seen plenty of discrimination and perhaps a pogrom or two, too. They were persecuted by the Czars, they were persecuted by Stalin, and basically, none of the USSR leaders after Stalin had much sympathy for them, either. I think Brin has a sharpened and sensitive view of things related to freedom of speech and other civil liberties.
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
The article suggests that Google decided to remove censorship and just needs time to do this, meanwhile giving the Chinese gov. a chance to wise-up.
This is NOT TRUE. Censorship was removed immediately after the statement on their blog was made, only to be reinstated a few hours later, probably under threat of having *.google.cn blacklisted.
There is no decision whatsoever. Things are being negotiated, which can only mean they will continue censored operation. The suggestion of a "ultimatum" to operate uncensored or not-at-all is totally false.
BTW, Google does not need to censor in order to operate a censored search engine. Just spider from within China and the Great Firewall should do the work for you.
Over a million and no complaints means something is wrong? How arbitrary and self serving.
Blar.
Since when didn't Japan take huge chunks of the US economy? When I first started to drive, it was really rare to see a japanese car, as in..nevah. Now? Who needed emergency bailouts again, to keep from going completely bankrupt? How about electronics? I remember when all the TVs,radios, HiFis, etc were predominantly US made, that's what you saw in the stores and in people's homes, with germany actually being second tier, then, Japanese electronics hit. Whammmo they hit. Now, how many US made TVs are there and so forth? Like zero? How about heavy equipment? We are the largest farm in this area, and just for tractors.lemme see here..we have one US made, john deere (and their smaller ones they sell are just rebadged yanmars AFAIK) *six* japanese (kubotas), three german or austrian (deutz and vetter) (that's just tractors, of course we have all sorts of other equipment, mixed as well) (and Indian mahindras are starting to sell pretty good around here now). How about motorcycles? Way back you saw some US and english bikes mostly, (harleys and triumphs mostly, with the odd bmw thrown in) Now? Rough guess, what I see is 7/8ths japanese bikes on the road, with china taking the dinky scooter market so far, but they will be expanding that. And so on
Ya, it changes around, the main point from a US perspective to keep focused on isn't so much where stuff is sourced *from*, it is where it *ain't sourced from*, which is more and more daily the USA being the "ain't". We continue to lose manufacturing all across the industrial spectrum, which is value-added wealth creation that increases the internal economy to a large degree. And hand in hand with losing manufacturing over the last four decades now, the US government and economic overlords (same dudes in the revolving door wall street/DC government axis) have had to result to accounting tricks and issuing ever more stupid compounded IOU paper to give the appearance of prosperity.
The number one US manufactured *thing* today is debt. Followed by advanced military weapons.....contemplate some outcomes there for awhile..
You can only do that "debt manufacturing" for so long before good money stops being thrown at bad money. Eventually, the planet is going to call the US on its debt and just stop doing that. Interesting times then...
This reserve currency deal, that came about from the Marshall Plan and the petrodollar phenomenon, has made accumulating all this debt possible, but it sure isn't going to last forever. You can't do this accumulate more debt than what you make on a smaller personal scale forever, as everyone knows, you'll go bankrupt and get bounced out on the street and your ride go away to the repo man, nor can you do it on a medium scale, nor even a huge large scale.
The timeline varies on your bankruptcy and crash and repo man showing up, but not that outcome.
Recently just placed a bet on this google vs. china. Read more about this at Rambodidit.blogspot.com (courteous link to this slashdot article already in place)
Bold stand? PLEASE. Google makes almost all of their money in China by selling ads on their US site to Chinese companies, not from google.cn. If they really felt China was evil, they would pull out their sales team and stop selling personal information to the "evil" Chinese. But you notice that there is no talk of that from these jokers.
Is our new found hero responsible for great acts like pleading stay and re-eanling the filtering quietly. Certainly, we are allowed to know, not on the front-page.
Google has not pulled out of China. They still are there. They said they would THINK ABOUT IT and no longer censor results.
Google will not pull out of China, rather they are playing poker to see if the Chinese government throws them out and blocks them. If they do (China) then the U.S. has grounds for complaining to the WTF.
As a Chinese in USA, I can tell you based on my personal experience and what I heard from all the people (many many of them) I know, no one in China really cares if google leaves China. Does it really provide anything you REALLY HAVE TO use?
And about "speech freedom", does Google itself follow the rule?
BTW in China/Korean/Japanese, Google never had upper hand in market anyway, I think in fact, google's philosophy is NOT really that matching in east Asia.
Spinning Google's decision as sour grapes just doesn't wash when clearly Microsoft and Yahoo are licking their chops at google.cn's leftovers.
As one who is wary of Google's potential dominance over individual privacy, I say BRAVO Google!
It's uncanny to see the pathetic sinophobes (sorry, sinoenvy) losers trying to suck in their own flabby guts and flagellate their manboob chests each and every time they see the Chinese getting things done right.
"He's always had an emotional tug within him, saying 'we shouldn't be making compromises',"
One of the site's founders, Larry Page, voted the motion down, as did the CEO, Eric Schmidt. But Page's co-founder, Sergey Brin, abstained. .
I suggest Brin might want to supercharge his "emotional tug", as it seems a bit underpowered, and was only able to move Brin to the kiss-your-sister, on-the-fence position of abstention.
BTW, can Tim Walker of The Independent sound a little more obsequious, and sycophant than the disrespectful irreverence attitude he seems to have adopted about Sergey and family?
"The family lived with Michael's mother in a small, three-room apartment in Moscow..."
A three-room apartment in Moscow in the 70's was a good deal. The author certainly isn't familiar with the realities of Soviet and post-Soviet Russia.
If only they would have stood up for free speech at the beginning, and not only after they found themselves with a disappointing 29% market share.
Er, Baidu had 1) been operating for seven years already when Google.cn was founded in China and 2) had the benefits of being a Chinese company that no doubt had leaders more in tune with Chinese culture.
Pick a country foreign to you. Now give your competitors a seven year head start. Now try to enter the market. Now tell me that 29% is "disappointing." Has anyone come even close to that against Google in the US?
I'd say 29% is pretty astonishing. What were you expecting?
29% if more than fair for any company not looking towards world domination. Be fearful of anyone who says that 1/3 of a billion people is not enough.