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Google.cn Still Remains In China
hackingbear writes "Google appears to be content to remain in China doing business as usual while it finds a way to work within the system, according to one of the search giant's founders. This despite a strong statement 30 days ago that it would stop censoring search results in China and possibly pull its business out of that country. And the company is still unwilling to confirm or deny if the alleged attacks were carried out by the Chinese government. 'I don't actually think the question of whether [the attacks were performed by] the Chinese government is that important,' Brin said. (That's the difference between state-sponsor vs. individual hacking. Why is that not important?) In the mean time, shortly after we celebrated google.cn lifting censorship, the exact same censorship has been quietly re-enabled as proved by this Chinese search query on June 4, despite the lack of any concrete actions by the Chinese government, which has so far made only useless general and standard statements on the matter."
And here we thought Google had a strong backbone to stand up to china. Apparently not.
Obviously not being evil is too expensive... maybe that explains the amount of evil in the world in general.
Aren't these submissions supposed to be moderated to keep these walls of partially intelligible text off the main page?
Top businesspeople in company overrule moral arguments from staff in order to ensure future profits.
News at eleven.
It's better to vote for what you want and not get it than to vote for what you don't want and get it.
- E. Debs
The quickest thing Google can do to lose the confidence of its users is be Two-Faced. With all the recent privacy concerns, if Google starts acting one way after saying "Don't be Evil," it's going to make everyone question if Google can be trusted. Can they?
It's true that the tank man does not rank number one on "tiananmen" as it does on google.com - but if I type tiananmen into the search box, the top suggestions are
tiananmen square protest
tiananmen square 1989
tiananmen square tank
tiananmen tank
tiananmen square tank man
tiananmen tank man
And if I make the search more specific by adding "tank", I do get a few copies of the infamously censored image on page 1, even on Google.cn.
Of course, I haven't digged this deeply before, so I don't know if the censorship was always this half-assed.
Doing business with a country where freedom of information is counter productive to your business model makes no sense.
when money is God WHO CARES RIGHT?
Well, yeah...
Where else would you put it?
Emacs: for people who just never know when to
Google knows if your origin IP is chinese. I'm sure you get different results for google.cn if you are in china or out.
Some special Chinese agent made a visit at Brin’s house at night, reminding him that they could make him disappear “just like that”.
I hope not. But it would not surprise me a bit if this was how it happened.
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
Not that I was expecting any better from them. Too much money involved. Still, doesn't stop me from being disappointed anyhow.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
Imagine if this wasn't censorship of search results that we were talking about. Instead, imagine that the Chinese government looked the other way while local officials demanded bribes for keeping the office utilities running. If you're a multinational company, those are the kind of things you need to deal with...and reconcile with a different set of ethics.
Companies need to decide whether or not they are willing to play by the local rules when they jump into an international market. Those bribes they pay may not be a good ethical choice, but they may make the company much more profitable. Since company shareholders are the only concern for most companies, they need to set aside their feelings and do what the local government says.
Personally, I think what they're doing is fine, simply because it's not our place to tell a foriegn government what to do. It's their country, and human rights abuses, censorship, Taiwan and the Dalai Lama shouldn't really matter to American citizens. That's how China chooses to keep their country in line (and growing economically at 10%+ per year, I might add.) It seems to work well for them, and even if it didn't, we can't tell them otherwise. Doing so puts us on the same Cold War era "keeping the world safe for democracy" bandwagon that hasn't worked for us in four wars since WW2. I've long held the belief that once we solve 100% of our social problems at home, then we can go lecture people around the world about how to behave.
Google, as a publicly traded company, has only one obligation: to make a profit for shareholders.
That's not necessarily true. A publicly-traded corporations primary obligation isn't to make a profit, it's to fulfill the goals laid out in the articles of incorporation and the prospectus that defined the public offering. In most cases, those documents say that the primary goal of the corporation is to make a profit, and that, then, is what the company's directors must focus on doing. But there are plenty of corporations, especially non-profits and for-profits that have a "social good" agenda, with different goals, and the directors of those corporations would be failing in their duty to their shareholders if they focused on profit at the expense of their stated goals.
Was "Don't be evil" part of Google's corporate charter? And if so, was it given an equal or higher priority than profitability? I don't know, but if so, then Google's directors have a legal obligation to abide by it.
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