What do we all think about Google caving in to China's demand for censorship?

[noxlumos]

Google has caved in to demands from the Chinese Govt to censor results displayed to users within China with particular regard to Chinese human rights abuses and pro democracy web sites.Yahoo provided information to the Govt last year which resulted in the jailing for 10 years of a Chinese journalist who was a democracy advocate.Does anyone else consider this to be a grave betrayal of the Chinese people by companies such as Google and Yahoo?

[gary baldy]

This is all about cold hard cash.
China is a massive untapped market and Google et al. will overlook trivial matters such as human rights issues in the quest to open this market up - which they can only do with the nod from said government.

[jno]

as I understand it, certain phrases won't produce results when you look them up on www.google.cn but people - including Chinese people - can still look them up on www.google.com, which, presumably, the authorities will still try to block. So all is not lost. I think there's some financial advantage for Google actually having a Chinese-based site, but it doesn't mean they're giving up the others and if I'm right Chinese surfers won't actually be any worse off.

[ll_billym]

Yes I agree that this isn't great but I don't see why you are singling out Google. Almost every company in the world wants to have a piece of China, as gary baldy says, it is a massive market.

If anyone really cared about the human rights abuses then there would be nothing in their lives labelled "Made in China".

The corporations want to sell to them, we want to buy cheap goods from them.

[bernardo]

It is better for Chinese people to have some access to some bits of Google (with a lot of stuff censored) than for the whole caboodle to be blocked. the little bits which get through will help to chip away the bamboo curtain.

[Oneeyedvic]

I'm not sure I agree with Bernardo on this.

To give a comparison, if everyone in this country was only allowed to read the Daily Mail, all other media being blocked, I guess that you could argue that we had access to non governement controlled news.

Sadly, although the government might find this useful, I'm not sure it would be in the public interest.

[Suaver]

just to stick my ten penneth in, i am an english man, living in china and you'd be surprised what you can't get on the internet.

you can't open any news pages whatsoever, such as bbc or yahoo, on any computer that i have found so i can only assume they try to block out as much western news as they possibly can.

[Hippy]

Even news and history reported from within their own borders is heavily censored. There is no public record of the demonstration and its barbaric suppression by the military and political high and mighty at Tiananmen Square. I also understand (though only from about half a dozen sources so it could be crazy crank conspiracy horse poo) that Chinese Internet users attempting to find out about such things are traced and and punished!

From Google co-founder Sergey Brin, "We ultimately made a difficult decision, but we felt that by participating there, and making our services more available, even if not to the 100 percent that we ideally would like, that it will be better for Chinese Web users, because ultimately they would get more information, though not quite all of it. One thing we do, and which we are implementing in China as well, is that if there's any kind of material blocked by local regulations we put a message to that effect at the bottom of the search engine."

Let us not forget that Google operates censorship in the Free West. Google, by request from host governments, blocks Nazi sites in France and Germany, Child pornography in a partial fashion almost everywhere, and if requested under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act can block any suspect item until the alleged copyright breach is resolved.

I can't help being split on this issue. It is a slippery slope entered to gain market share and profits in China, but there is surely a place for some censorship in matters that are manifestly exploitative, destructive, and harmful to individuals and society. However the real question is who decides what these matter should be?

[chinois]

I heard that china has a national firewall and hundreds of internet police which attempts to censor everything on the net. The chinese government wouldnt have allowed google to provide an uncensored site, so they provided what they were allowed to. It seems like a problem with the fascist government, not the media company.