Google Blinks
The UK Guardian reports on Google accepting Chinese government restrictions in return for being able to base servers in the country:
It acknowledged that this ran contrary to its corporate ethics, but said a greater good was served by providing information in China. "In order to operate from China, we have removed some content from the search results available on google.cn, in response to local law, regulation or policy. While removing search results is inconsistent with Google's mission, providing no information (or a heavily degraded user experience that amounts to no information) is more inconsistent with our mission."
No doubt there will be - as they say - a wave of outrage from concerned citzens, especially in the US, where certain countries seem to push specific inflammatory buttons.
But Rupert Murdoch sold his soul to Peking many years ago and it doesn't seem to have harmed his business standing around the world?
Chinaman posted about the
Chinaman posted about the same time. He posted the following:
"MSN is doing it, Yahoo is doing it, actually all companies eager for a piece of China do it. Google didn't want to be left behind so announced they will "voluntarily" start blocking politically sensitive terms on its new China site.
They probably already did it to some extent but saying it out loud will win them some brownies with the Chinese Government that once again showed that they decide what information is good enough for their people to know about.
Don't do evil, just cooperate. via Reuters"
Talking out the side of their neck
They already remove all sorts of sites from Google on a regular basis for violating their guidelines, DMCA requests (the LAW), etc. so how is that different than applying another level of filtering to fit China's laws and guidelines?
It's no different, just BS media hound material.
If you want to operate in a foreign country you have to abide by their laws or simply keep out so this entire topic is silly.
Silly as the topic may seem
it's even sillier that a company that preaches the "Do no evil" concept gets very selective when it comes down to doing business in China.
Every country has different legislation (I will just skip the part about the integrity and ambiguity of these laws) and as such it makes sense to follow the laws from a business perspective.
They should just stop pretending to have ethics. In a way they just admitted to this, so that's good to know.
Ethics
Well being ethical is also abiding by the law so it's a catch-22
being ethical is also
in many cases not true. at least not when you look back through history at things like slavery vs freeing slaves.
Exactly chinaman - Google
Exactly chinaman - Google themselves started this whole crappy "Do no evil" mantra.
Oh well, at least nobody can blame George Bush on this...yet ;)
this just in...
Bush in talks with Hu Jintao
Cooperation vs. Collaboration
The worry is that cooperation will skirt over into collaboration with a repressive regime. Corporations can get tainted by that.
In other news: China has
In other news: China has modified their law so that any company wanting to operate in China must make available to the Chinese government any information it ever provides to the DOJ or their own government.
(Not yet, but not imposs.)