The response to Google in China has been interesting to say the least. Internet censorship in mainland China - Wikipedia
A great Sturm and Drang in the U.S. over this, since Google is playing hard to get with the U.S. government and 'hey sailor' with the Chinese.
Dan Verton calls for a Boycott of Google over their Chinese Search Engine. My Left Libertarian pal Brad Spangler agrees and has dropped all google ads off his site. At least he also posts that he is looking for alternatives to Yahoo and MSN search engines which comply with all national legal standards and supply information to those governments upon court ordered request.Microsoft censors Chinese blogs
I hate to break into legalise but thats what this amounts to. In the U.S. Google can challenge the government because it has a constitutional right to and as a corporation it is seen as an 'individual' under the law. In China or Germany or heck Canada, the Criminal Codes and laws are different.
This Boycott will fizzle, because Google is the largest search engine in th world, and its worth billions, and because only a small circle of friends will join in, and.....because its silly. Google complied with China for one and one only reason, a reason all neo-cons, neo-lberals and libertarians should recognize. To get their business. It was a business decision. And business is amoral. Capitalism is amoral.
Brad quotes another Libertarian free marketer L. Neil Smith who is all in a tizzy over Google.
Google sees nothing wrong with this, nor, apparently, do many of the people I correspond with on a regular basis. It's their business, my friends reply, and they can do anything with it that strikes their fancy.
Besides, goes the cant, if they comply now, they may even be able to help the Chinese people to gradually become freer than they are today.
Google is helping the Chinese government keep the Chinese people oppressed.
Plain and simple.
No way out of it.
Google is helping the Chinese government keep the Chinese people oppressed.
Simon mistakes the Internet for Google. Google is just one way to access the internet. It's the WWW that keeps the world afloat in a new counter economy. One which sees the free flow of information circumvent such things as national laws, copyright, and intellectual property laws.
And contrary to his assertion that Google is limiting freedom for the Chinese people such is not the case as these two articles from 2004 show. China has been online for just over a decade and in that time it has seen the increase in free speech online.
BBC NEWS | Technology | Bypassing China's net firewall
PCWorld.com - China Finds Freedom Behind Great Firewall
So why has Google done this you ask. A billion dollar company could have waited to enter China or waited till it could set better conditions of doing business in China. Well that's the whole key to Google and all the other internet businesses wanting into China isn't it. Business. A billion comsumers.
And in Googles case it was facing the fact that the Chinese economy has been driven on the illegal, by Western standards, production of replicas and bootleg products. From watches to DVD's and computers. China's capitalism has been one long litany of criminal based enterprises. Only now that it is accepted into the international gang of Capitalists, the WTO has it agreed to reduce its favoured method of primitive accumulation of capital, counterfeit products and copyright violations.
In Googles case it was a business decision, it was facing a Chinese search engine modeled on Google that was launched last year with much fanfare. And it was already making money on the Hong Kong Stock exchange. Google is trying to limit its competition, if not wipe it out. Google Agrees to Censor Results in China
Baidu.com Inc., a Beijing-based company in which Google owns a 2.6 percent stake, currently runs China's most popular search engine. But a recent Keynote Systems survey of China's Internet preferences concluded that Baidu remains vulnerable to challenges from Google and Yahoo Inc.
To obtain the Chinese license, Google agreed to omit Web content that the country's government finds objectionable. Google will base its censorship decisons on guidance provided by Chinese government officials.
Freedom be damned, this is war of all against all. Capitalism has nothing to do with freedom or democracy, or human rights. It's all about private property, profit and who has the most surplus value, toys, wins. And in this case Google is competing for market dominance, monopoly, over Baidu and Yahoo.
Thats why this happens:Within / Without: Internet, censorship, China and you
Microsoft’s MSN Spaces continues to censor its Chinese language blogs, and has become more aggressive and thorough at censorship since I first checked out MSN’s censorship system last summer. On New Years Eve, MSN Spaces took down the popular blog written by Zhao Jing, aka Michael Anti. Now all you get when you attempt to visit his blog at: http://spaces.msn.com/members/mranti/ is the error message pictured above. (You can see the Google cache of his blog up until Dec.22nd here.)
Note, his blog was TAKEN DOWN by MSN people. Not blocked by the Chinese government.
And instead of complaining about those horrible Chinese dictators and censors as L. Neil Smith does, with his rabid red baiting stereotyping, let us remember that China is not censoring the net, it is asking Capitalist American Companies to do it for them.
Virtual censorship is a series of defensive policies undertaken by the Chinese authorities to prevent China s “domestic cyberspace” from being merged with “foreign cyberspaces” and keep apart the apolitical and political domains of CMC. It is virtual because the control mechanisms, albeit implemented in both the tangible and intangible spaces, aim at constraining nonofficial OPC in the virtual sphere. It is censorship because the policies reduce the interactions between the cyberspaces and the scope of political discussion by means of prohibition, supervision and punishment. From the perspective of democratization, virtual censorship is an undesirable segment of the emerging virtual reality defined as “a simulation of existing realities” and “the
creations of a new reality” (Frissen, 1997:113), which attempts at rendering boundaries in the cyberspace and those in the real space congruent. Yet from the angle of globalization, it is natural and readily comprehensible since various forms of local resistance are constituents of the globalization process (Sreberny-Mohammadi, 1991; Appadurai, 1990)
And as usual in the real free spaces between corporations, governments, cops exists in cyberspace, where there is a problem thier is a hack, a freeware program to provide a solution to the problem. The internet remains a contradiction only to those who wish to dominate it, to the rest of us it remains liberated space, where real libertarian values are expressed. Don't boycott Google hacktivize cyberspace. Toronto 'hactivists' win grant
P EA CE F IRE
June 20, 2005
In response to the news that MSN Spaces China is filtering words from the titles of their users' blogs including "freedom", "democracy" and "Taiwan independence", the Committee to Protect Bloggers, of which Peacefire is a member, has released a set of instructions describing how the Chinese can bypass the word filtering on MSN Spaces and create blogs with banned keywords in the title. The instructions in English are here; they have also been translated into Chinese here.
October 24, 2004
We need your help!
Almost all Internet users in China and the Middle East are blocked from accessing political Web sites that criticize the government of their country. After the release of our Circumventor software in 2003, Internet users in "censored" countries had a way to get around Internet censorship, by asking someone in an "uncensored" country to install the Circumventor software for them. (If you install the Circumventor software on a machine in an uncensored country, it gives you a URL, which you can then give to people in censored countries such as China, so they can use the URL to get around Internet blocking.) However, few people in China or the Middle East actually had contacts in uncensored countries that they could ask for help.
If you download and install our Circumventor software, it will give you a URL that you can use -- and which you can also give to your friends -- to bypass all types of blocking software. And at the end of the installation process, the installer will ask you if you would like to share your Circumventor URL with users in censored countries such as China as well. By saying "Yes" to this option, you can help people in censored countries bypass Web blocking.
See Big Brother Bush
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