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Brinksmanship Continues In Google-China Row Over Censorship
According to The Financial Times, "Google has drawn up detailed plans for the closure of its Chinese search engine and is now '99.9 per cent' certain to go ahead [with the closure] as talks over censorship with the Chinese authorities have reached an apparent impasse, according to a person familiar with the company’s thinking. In a hardening of positions on both sides, the Chinese government also on Friday threw down a direct public challenge to the US search company, with a warning that it was not prepared to compromise on internet censorship to stop Google leaving." "99.9 per cent" or not, both sides say they'd actually like Google to remain in China, but neither is willing to bend publicly on the question of censorship. If Google closes google.cn, as now seems likely, it could still maintain its R&D office in Beijing and its sales force, who sell ads on google.com targeted into China.
It's nice that they're taking a stand, even if the gap will be filled by Baidu fairly quickly.
This is where you put your money where your mouth is, Google. You always want chances to prove your little slogan. Here's a great opportunity to change some people's minds who think you've grown into Everycorp.
Haida Manga
What changed? They used to be fine with censoring their results. Surely a little bit of hacking wouldn't change morals that much; what else has changed?
While I'm fairly certain that google doing this is the right thing to do, I don't see how this hurts China. It would be trivial (read: a matter of trivia, not necessarily super easy, but it has obviously been done before, and is a known process) to have a new emerging search engine for China.
Google could stay there and stay on top because they have the best product (for now). If they leave the market, something will fill the vacuum and profit greatly from the billion.s of people in China.
I don't think China has much to lose here, I'm curious as to whether or not someone has a good convincing argument to the contrary?
I am not sure what pull you are talking about. Google threatened to leave China if they didn't stop censoring, China told them they are free to go.
Thats not a lot of pull in my book.
Morpheus, God of Dreams.
If they can't get the government to stop censorship, what is the point of Google pulling out of China? It looks like the result of Google's actions will be:
- there is less search engine choice in China
- (presumably) some people from Google China will lose their jobs
It would be completely different if Google was so important that they could force the Chinese government to do what they want. But they are not even the biggest search engine in China. Why is everyone acting like Google is doing the right thing, when it seems like what they are doing will be bad for everyone involved (the employees, users, and shareholders)?
Could Google not go on the offensive by listing censored results and providing a link that leads not to the censored content, but to a page explaining that the government is afraid of the content?
What this is all about.
Recently quit a lot of independent security researchers and companies showed evidence that if you do any kind of business in China, you are BOUND to be hacked by "someone" from China. They also said that there is no defence against it (the China attacks will eventually always succeed).
Google was one of the victims of such attacks. They considered the facts. What do we get by doing business in China?
1) Small market share (the Chinese search engine Baidu dominates the search engine market in China)
2) Trojans on our internal networks.
Let's give up (because of 1 and 2). But let's do it in a way that wins us PR points. Let's do it in a way that makes us look good. Like, true fighters for freedom.
Let's tell them we're not going to obey their laws and regulations. We (Google) KNOW that they will not allow us to get away with that. But we don't care, because we've decided to leave anyway.
I've got no love for Google, they are merely the next hegemony as far as I am concerned. I think it's excessive to say that "Google lost in China". They entered the market late against entrenched local competition. They will always be seen as the face of USA Inc. rather than an independent or local company: they can't play the friendly local card, they will always be the big bad foreigners.
Google wants to be the international search engine, but there is a lot more effort to filter out "inappropriate content". I don't know what form the instructions for censorship take but presumably they have some list of vague words or contexts plus possibly numerous requests for "suspicious results" to be removed. All that work must eat into profits.
Furthermore they believe they are in a hostile climate what with numerous hacking attempts. I can understand why they are thinking to get out. They seem to be doing alright in the rest of the world. Why do you say they have to stay ? Surely they can go off and focus their efforts on something else and come back later ?
The search services are the part that pertains to censorship. Google isn't severing business ties, they are refusing to facilitate censorship.
Is Google actually delivering on their "Don't be evil" thing?
It's Sergei, mostly.
Can't find the reference right now, but there's a story out there in which it's posited that his childhood experience in the Soviet Union left him with an aversion to coercive state power. He allowed himself to be talked into going into China by Schmidt and Page, but when it became clear that China was using them to target human rights activists, Sergei baulked.
Having agreed at the outset to put limits on what they would put up with from China, Larry and Eric had no choice but to go along when Sergei insisted that they retaliate.
Crumb's Corollary: Never bring a knife to a bun fight.
China has always wanted to build market share for Baidu. The general Chinese diagram of the world ("Us" vs "Barbarians") has never and will never change.
I scream. You scream. I assume that means we're both acquainted with the problem. We proceed.
It's not Google's job to tell the Chinese government how to do things, no matter how wrong they think those ideas are, or how Google justifies those beliefs.
What? That makes no sense whatsoever. Google is a U.S. corporation, and could not under any circumstances "tell" the PRC to do anything. The PRC can, on the other hand, tell Google how it must behave when operating within Chinese territory.
... quite the opposite in fact. What Google is objecting to is China's government telling Google how to run Google's business. China is insisting on concessions that Google's founders (in particular, Sergey Brin) are unwilling to accept. End of story. That is their choice and, oddly enough, it's being a U.S. corporation rather than a Chinese corporation that allows them to make that decision. If the converse were true, if it were Baidu being told to bend over and take it, well, let's just say they would do exactly what their government handlers told them to do.
Consequently, Google isn't telling anyone how to run their government
The point being, the average US guy has screwed up beliefs concerning China's motivations behind Internet control.
I see ... and the average Chinese guy has a clear understanding of U.S. motivations behind our current hands-off attitude towards Internet control.
Don't make this into more than it is.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
China's per-capita GDP is tiny
FGD 135
It's one thing to know you are helpless to stop evil from happening. It's quite another thing to accept it to the point where you participate in it. Google got in there presumably hoping to in some way help turn the course a little bit. If there's no hope they can do that, there's only money. For Bing that might be enough, but apparently for Google it isn't.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Yes. Part of what makes the internet so useful is the 'network effect'. If China loses access to Google's indexes of all the European and US produced information (arguably superior to Baidu's now, and probably will remain so in the future) then they do actually lose the full benefits of the network effect. Now there is an interesting philosophical bit here. Google knows while it is in China it must obey Chinese Law and sovereignty. Rather than break the law they are faced with a dilemma of what to do. They have decided it is not worth doing business is China and the bucketloads money they would make (even if behind Baidu) is not worth 'kowtowing' (now there's an awful word) and reinforcing a repressive censorship policy. Yes, Google will be heavily criticised by some, just as environmentalists in the 1960s and 1970s were mocked at the time, yet the mainstream have accepted parts of that worldview as being necessary for human progress.
But... if you're blocking level 0 content, this doesn't help. Repost away...
I really think people, and certain governments in particular, are completely missing the boat on this issue.
A good, effective search engine helps authorities find "illicit" content just as effectively as it helps the regular people looking for it.
Even if you are an oppressive government looking to quell dissension, or a "responsible" government looking to crack down on crime and kiddie porn... having access to good search results would -help- you do so more effectively.
"But...", the governments cry, "couldn't we block these evil things from the common prole while maintaining a 'privileged' access so -we- could search?"
No, you can't. The effectiveness of the search results is based on crowdsourcing and the accumulation of access data. Block access and you lose both the data and the effectiveness of your search.
If, for the sake of argument, you wanted to keep your people from accessing porn, or seditious diatribes against the state, you really should embrace open search engines.
Let people search and build up the data to efficiently find the things you detest, then you can search too and block those sites at your great National Firewall of Destiny. No matter how sites change addresses, as the people who want to find them find them, they will bubble up in search results, and your official firewall can be updated.
Effective search engines, like so many things, are in essence morally neutral. You can use them both to free or oppress.
The big problem the global community is running into is that, at a fundamental level, we simply can't agree on what is reasonable, unacceptable, or even illegal. Perhaps the UN can step up with a minimal set of standards for internet conduct... but otherwise we're sinking deeper into a mire of legal confusion. When The Republic of Republica declares it illegal to post images of the Prime Minister (because that helps steal his soul) or mailboxes (due to privacy concerns and a local mailbox vandalism spree), or panda bears (which local religion holds to be symbolic of pure evil), should German, US, or Chinese search engines purge them from their databases? We are now a globall community... and we are very soon going to need a global set of laws and guidelines.
Unfortunately, human beings have proven themselves spectacularly bad at coming up with reasonable compromises on such things. (The EU struggles with this regularly, as does the US.) Often this basically means taking the union of everyone's "forbid" list and declaring it forbidden, which obviously ends up depriving most societies of content they see as reasonable and acceptable in the name of pleasing everyone.
I thought I had remembered that too. One of those fun-filled-but-fail-at-a-party facts I have stuffed away. The boys still own Google, or enough of it to decide it's course over any objections by share holders et al.
I feel certain that if Google pulls out of China, they're fucked, so to speak. How then can MS or Yahoo be seen as non-corrupt if they stay? While it's political in nature it has a certain PR value to it as well. Baidu, while fairly well used is basically by Chinese, for Chinese, about Chinese. Outside of China its usefulness falls very quickly. Inside of China it filters whatever it's told to filter. The Chinese, it seems, remain isolationist. Now if we could only paint Walmart et al as evil for doing business with the Chinese. If you want to see the Chinese people free, help motivate them to be angry with their government. Right now, Chinese school children can look at a picture of tank man and not know what it is. Stopping a little censorship won't change that. There needs to be enough anger to spill the blood of tyrants.
I'm afraid that probably won't come till there is no jobs, no money to buy food, no exports income, and no way to buy food from across the border. Culturally, China (as stated above) is stagnate-ish, stuck in their ways, isolationist culturally. You have to do a lot of shaking to get those nuts to fall out of the tree. It may take a lot more people like those running Google to shake the tree hard enough. I hate to say it, but a good international news-making incident might be enough to encourage North Americans to stop buying Chinese made goods. If that hurts North American retailers in the short term, it will hopefully hurt Chinese manufacturers in the long term. A tricky game to say the least, but if you want to play it without guns somebody has to get shot with something in the somewhere at some point.
Perhaps if /b/tards and fag hating Christians stopped their normal crap long enough to petition our government to inspect 100% of incoming goods from China at a cost to the manufacturer it might make a difference to their bottom line, our pets' and children's lives, and the world over all ? It would be awful if Google were to rank stories about Chinese goods higher than they have been doing... don't you think? wink wink nudge nudge
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OK. Say that they leave. Will the attacks stop? You still have valuable assets, perhaps at new locations..
You eliminate an entire class of attacks, i.e. those which originate from the Chinese government on a network they control. Further, you can simply block all traffic from China and eliminate a whole other raft of it. This leaves proxies &c of course, so it prevents nothing, but it certainly reduces a lot of attack surface. If they're not really making any money there anywhy, why bother?
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"