I plan on boycotting every one of these labels until the RIAA stops ruining kids' lives with these draconian lawsuits. Sure, illegally downloading copyrighted songs is wrong, and I don't oppose the idea of some kind of legal action against people who, say, download and redistribute 10,000 of them. But the penalties for small-time downloaders are getting totally out of proportion to the offenses committed. The RIAA is using a sledgehammer to kill flies, and it will continue to do so as long as we continue to give its members money.
As the other respondent pointed out, I was wrong, and Ask.com actually does have (planned) operations in China -- which, I assume, means they will be setting up an Ask.cn website or something like that. If the experience with Google is any indication, they will also have to agree to filter the results returned by the Chinese version of their search engine in order for it to not be blocked by Chinese ISPs. However, there are search engines which genuinely don't cooperate in any way with the Chinese government.
And that's the point, in my opinion: not whether or not a particular search engine or other content provider is used in China -- which means merely that its IP address isn't blocked by Internet routers, owned by others, which are physically in China and subject to Chinese legal jurisdiction -- but whether or not it is cooperating with Chinese censorship laws in order to not be blocked there. In the latter case, it is, in the interests of profit, enabling something which I and a great many other people find repugnant and immoral. That's why I don't use Google (and now, I suppose, Ask.com). I agree with your criticisms of Yahoo! and MSN and I don't use them either, and I was focusing on Google because of the thread topic.
At the risk of Godwinning the discussion, suppose the New York Times had published a special German-language edition during the 1930s for sale in Nazi Germany, and as a condition of being allowed to sell the paper there, had had to agree to content restrictions imposed by the Nazis. For example, it wouldn't have been allowed to say too much about the persecution of Jews by the government. Maybe the Times would have argued that it was better if the German people got heavily filtered foreign news rather than none at all. Maybe they even would have been allowed to print a disclaimer on the front page saying that the German government had censored some of their articles. But would anyone today consider their actions to have been moral? And is there any doubt that the Nazis would have tightened the restrictions on the German-language Times or barred it from Germany altogether if there'd been the slightest hint that it was emboldening the opposition?
No matter how sincerely the Times may have believed in this hypothetical scenario that it was serving a greater good, it would have been freely choosing to help perpetrate injustice, and thereby would been helping to legitimize it. Google is doing the same thing today in China, which is why, IMHO, people who value freedom of speech and thought should not associate themselves with it.
One of the major defenses of Google being made here is that they plan to disclose to their Chinese users when search results are being censored. Imagine that a year or two from now, Google has a large market share in China. What's to stop the Chinese government from changing its mind at that point and ordering Google to cease making this disclosure? What would Google do? To whom would they appeal, the Communist courts?
Google would have to either cooperate with the government's demand or shut down their Chinese operations. Financially, it would probably be much harder for them to pull out of China at that point than it would have been to never do business there to begin with. They'd have to either obey the Chinese government or take a huge hit to their profits, which shareholders probably wouldn't allow. So, Google would wind up being no different in this respect from Yahoo! or MSN.
Slashdot Mirror
I get my PC games at Best Buy -- is that a sufficiently respectable place for a gamer to shop? :)
http://www.riaa.com/about/members/default.asp
I plan on boycotting every one of these labels until the RIAA stops ruining kids' lives with these draconian lawsuits. Sure, illegally downloading copyrighted songs is wrong, and I don't oppose the idea of some kind of legal action against people who, say, download and redistribute 10,000 of them. But the penalties for small-time downloaders are getting totally out of proportion to the offenses committed. The RIAA is using a sledgehammer to kill flies, and it will continue to do so as long as we continue to give its members money.
-K.Ai.-
And that's the point, in my opinion: not whether or not a particular search engine or other content provider is used in China -- which means merely that its IP address isn't blocked by Internet routers, owned by others, which are physically in China and subject to Chinese legal jurisdiction -- but whether or not it is cooperating with Chinese censorship laws in order to not be blocked there. In the latter case, it is, in the interests of profit, enabling something which I and a great many other people find repugnant and immoral. That's why I don't use Google (and now, I suppose, Ask.com). I agree with your criticisms of Yahoo! and MSN and I don't use them either, and I was focusing on Google because of the thread topic.
At the risk of Godwinning the discussion, suppose the New York Times had published a special German-language edition during the 1930s for sale in Nazi Germany, and as a condition of being allowed to sell the paper there, had had to agree to content restrictions imposed by the Nazis. For example, it wouldn't have been allowed to say too much about the persecution of Jews by the government. Maybe the Times would have argued that it was better if the German people got heavily filtered foreign news rather than none at all. Maybe they even would have been allowed to print a disclaimer on the front page saying that the German government had censored some of their articles. But would anyone today consider their actions to have been moral? And is there any doubt that the Nazis would have tightened the restrictions on the German-language Times or barred it from Germany altogether if there'd been the slightest hint that it was emboldening the opposition?
No matter how sincerely the Times may have believed in this hypothetical scenario that it was serving a greater good, it would have been freely choosing to help perpetrate injustice, and thereby would been helping to legitimize it. Google is doing the same thing today in China, which is why, IMHO, people who value freedom of speech and thought should not associate themselves with it.
-K.Ai.-
In any case, here is a list of search engines which (according to the site) really don't cooperate with the Chinese government's censorship policies:
http://noluv4google.com/article.php?id=800 -K.Ai.-
ask.com has no operations there. -K.Ai.-
Google would have to either cooperate with the government's demand or shut down their Chinese operations. Financially, it would probably be much harder for them to pull out of China at that point than it would have been to never do business there to begin with. They'd have to either obey the Chinese government or take a huge hit to their profits, which shareholders probably wouldn't allow. So, Google would wind up being no different in this respect from Yahoo! or MSN.