Google defiant over censorship in China

This story from the Observer has been making the rounds in Chinese Internet circles:

Google is to enter the political arena in earnest this week when it debates freedom of speech, intellectual property rights and how to connect Africa to the internet at a special UN conference. [...]

Google will declare itself unrepentant over the controversial decision to censor its search engine at the behest of Beijing. At the first Internet Governance Forum in Athens, starting tomorrow, the firm will insist its presence in China does more good than harm by getting more information to more people.

Knowing a number of Google folks related to this policy, I think “unrepentant” is too strong a word for their “lesser of two evils” approach. I’ll wait to see the actual reports from the conference.

Google’s motto, ‘Do no evil’, has taken a battering in recent months.

Actually, Google’s informal corporate motto is “Don’t be evil,” and I’m still surprised how many journalists and media outlets consistently get this wrong.

It’s a subtle but important difference. You can partake in unsavory “lesser evil” methods without actually being evil. And ever since “axis of evil” and “evildoers” have been introduced by G.W. Bush, I’m convinced the word “evil” should not be thrown around so casually.

Google is bound to be put under pressure over its foray into China. [Andrew] McLaughlin [head of global public policy at Google] said: ‘Google.cn is censored but we’ve come up with a technique for deciding what is to be censored that is basically technical, not editorial, and very reactive. That leads us to blocking from our site the minimum that the ISP [internet service provider] level requires.

Now, to rebut this slightly - just because a system is “basically technical” and “very reactive” doesn’t mean that the blocking decisions are necessarily less restrictive than ones that might be human-oriented and sluggish. Perhaps it would me more accurate to say Google’s system has “lexical” or “syntactic” precision rather than banning broad “themes” or “subjects,” and that has the potential to prevent overblocking of content though it does not guarantee it.

Let’s also not forget Yahoo! and Microsoft have done far worse things to China users than any other US dotcoms to date. So while we debate whether Google meets its own Code of Conduct, we should also question why others don’t have one.

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This entry was posted on Monday, October 30th, 2006 at 12:39 am and is filed under China, GFW, Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.