A major part of Google's justification for google.cn censorship is that google.cn will tell you if a page is censored--so at least you know something is hidden from you.  Google says they do the same thing if a Western country insists that some piece of content be removed.  You could make an argument that this means google.cn does nothing to worsen the censorship situation of China--if you make a query and the search result tells you its incomplete, you're no worse off than if google.cn didn't exist.  Worse than censorship is propaganda--if Google had offered the false impression that it was offering a complete search of the internet while only offering a censored one.

I suppose you could argue that Google should boycott China until human rights abuse ends, but that makes no sense in light of American free trade policies with China--we don't need corporations imposing their own sanctions at their whim on other countries.

Google and Microsoft (which has censored some bloggers)  have both made the interesting argument that restrictions on information should be treated as restrictions on trade.  Congress wasn't interested. If the American government was serious about standing up to Chinese repression, or at least coordinating some sort of policy for American corporations dealing with China, it's complaining on this matter would not seem so hypocritical.

There is a bigger issue than censorship, though.  The matter of local governments having access to corporation information in their borders.  Just as America tries to subpeona Google results related to pornography, can China get access to more detailed search results that would allow them to track down dissidents?  Yahoo has apparently cooperated with China in locating some dissidents for prosecution--and while it's easy to bash them for that, it isn't clear what other choice they had in the matter or how Google or Microsoft or any other corporation would react in the same situation.  

For many people, our computers know more about us than our priests, psychologists, or even lawyers.  Until some kind of "computer-user" privilege is recognize, laws all over the globe will be in a very unusual state.

I can't help but remember that during Clinton's presidency, his administration suffered a brief but poignant bit of criticism when Loral, a very large defense company, sold satellite and space technology to China with our government's approval.  Sure, partisan hacks dominated the debate but legitimate questions about how far American-based but international companies should be allowed to go when the interests of commerce collide with the interests of global politics.

These days, we're so solidly in the information age that the phrase "information age," is a cliche that made everyone's eyes glaze over as soon as they read it.  We're certainly at a point where access to information is as critical as access to data about how to put a satellite in orbit.  What Google, and Microsoft before Google, has done is to actively help a totalitarian regime control its populace in an are where information networks are so prevalent that they serve to undermine totalitarian regimes simply by existing.

Googles answer that, "giving them access to some information is better than being shut out of China and giving them access to none," is simply a crass evasion of the issue.  Imagine that the US government decided that the only newspaper to be published in the US will be the National Inquirer.  Sure, the government could say, "giving you one paper is better then us banning papers wholesale," but that argument wouldn't make the policy right or moral.

Currently, a lot of technology companies who sell internationally are restricted from sell certain of their products in certain places.  This goes all the way down to the level of laptop computers.

International commerce, I think, is a good thing, but we have always realized, in our laws, that it can't be completely unfettered because there are global political issues that move with commerce.

Why should we let companies based in the US, that have multibillion dollar market caps because of US investors and that collect billions in revenues because of US consumers aid governments that follow values that are antithetical to our own?

If Loral selling to China was some example of Clinton compromising our national security, how is Google or Microsoft explicitly helping the Chinese government keep information from China's people not the same, or an even more eggregious issue?

As I said, I'm all for global commerce.  I want to buy things from other places and I want to sell things to other places.  But there have to be limits.  Companies based in the U.S., that only grew to be large enough to sell internationally because of support from U.S. consumers and the U.S. government, should certainly show some loyalty to the country and culture that made their existence possible. 

thosethingswesay.blogspot.com

The government of China recently imposed requirements on Google mandating that they block access to certain sites the PRC deemed objectionable.

This doesn't seem like an accurate description to me. Google is just a search engine.  It doesn't really provide access to sites, or restrict access to web sites, other than it's own web site.  It provides information on which web sites exist, and it provides hyperlinks to other web sites.  But those hyperlinks will only work for internet users whose internet providers alreadt permit access to the sites the links call.

Whether a web address is blocked or is not blocked by China is independent of anything Google does.  If someone in China clicks on a hyperlink to a site or enters the URL for that site in their browser's address field, then they will get to that site if China's internet technologies do not block it.  And they will not get that site if China does block it.

If the site is blocked by the Chinese governnment's internet blocking technology, then it doesn't matter if a hyperlink to the site appears in a Google search result - the link won't work.  Similarly, if the site is not blocked, then a user can get to that site by entering it in the browser's address field.

So does Google really have to obey?  Apparently yes, since they moved their host servers to China, (to improve the quality of service and probably to impress the Chinese with their local loyalty).   But international fights in cyberspace do cloud matters of  where ‘local’ really is.

I was under the impression that it doesn't much matter where Google's own servers happen to be.  If China so chooses, it can restrict access to the main Google search engine - the one you get to by navigating to www.google.com, - by restricting access to the servers that are found with that address, even if those servers are outside China.  And it already was preventing access to the main Google site.  Google can't censor the dissemination of its information in China if that information is not being disseminated in the first place.  What Google has chosen to do is to provide an alternative version of its search engine, one that you navigate to by going to www.google.cn.  If Google does not provide an alternative search engine, then Chinese users will simply not have access to any Google engines, except sporadically and clandestinely due to deficiencies in China's blocking technologies.

The question for Google is this:  Do we want to provide only our regular search engine, in which case China's users will not be granted access to it, or do we want to provide an alternative, less comprehensive version, that China will allow users to navigate to.  Google is not actively engaged in blocking sites - it is providing information on and links to millions of sites, but just not as much information as it provides on the main site.  The alternative is that Chinese government would prevent Google from providing any information and any links to Chinese users.  It seems clear to me that providing some information is better than providing none.

Suppose you are a publisher of editions of the collected sonnets of Shakespeare, or of William Blake's Songs of Innocence and Experience.  You are dealing with a government that makes you the following offer: either you publish an slightly abridged version of these works, one that does not include a certain handful of the poems, or we do not allow you to sell any edition at all in our country.  And let's assume you are a non-profit, and that making money is not an issue - you sell the books at cost either way, and your only aim is to spread knowledge of the works of Shakespeare and Blake. What do you do?  My sense is that it would be best to produce and sell the abridged works.  Books that contain 90% of the works are better than no books at all.

But if that government allows no means for the people to make such extractions...

thosethingswesay.blogspot.com

I mostly agree with both the author of the aritcle and your statements, and I understand Google's decision pretty well. I do, however, want to point out, that Google is hardly a non-profit. I am more than certain, that the ability to do business, and obtain profit from their google.cn outfit played a part in their decision. I do not think, however, that the "high moral ground" is shifted in any way by understanding that.

There are two questions.  Could Google put up more of a fight with the Chinese?  In any situation in which countries have opened themselves to other countries there have been frictions.  Are the Chinese people and the world better off if Google, in some form, is available in China or if it boycotts China?

Daniel A. Greenbaum

I think Google's decision was the right one if only because we never heard so much about censorship in the mainstream media (and blogosphere) than in the recent weeks. Refusing to enter China would not have sparked so much soul-searching from the Americans wondering if they're promoting Chinese anti-free speech laws.

As I have said previously Google and its competitors have taken too much responsibility for what gets found on the web.

Gmail now places ads along side the mail message. To show how well their "content analysis" works here is a fragment from a message: "Those of you who have proposed or intend to propose panels to...". The mail is about an upcoming conference.

The ads? They are all about how to do marriage proposals. Viewing the spam folder yields recipes for the famous canned meat product. This is the company that determines what you can find when you are looking for information?

--- Policies not Politics
          Daily Landscape

If we're talking about evil corporations doing business with China, let's start with some others and rank them in order of evilness and potential evilness:

1) News Corporation

2) Walmart

3) Microsoft

4) Yahoo

5) GOP Corporate Fascists Inc. etc.

Then we can discuss Google, OK? 

Quite some years ago, I was asked to work on the first of several (failed) attempts to connect China to the Internet. I knew that the government intended to filter content, and thought long and hard about the ethics of the situation. Eventually, I concluded that having some Internet connectivity would get more free information into China than not having any.

The first attempt failed largely because the Chinese government tried to micromanage something they didn't understand. Much of this was in specialized technical areas, but one always makes me laugh with unintended consequences.

Top-level domains (TLD) like .com, .edu, .org, based on category, are somewhat of an anachronism. Yes, there are controversial new TLDs to help find something, such as .museum. A great many new names, however, use a TLD based on the two-letter international standard code for a country (.us, .ca, .uk, .de, .ru) or some special cases such as .eu for the European Union.

Some Chinese functionary got the idea that reducing China to .cn was somehow an insult, and argued and argued until the appropriate name administrators agreed to let them have a TLD of .china. They never actually used it. At the time, I did not make myself popular -- until they broke up laughing -- with the namespace managers, after I explained that this set a precedent for a TLD of .theformeryugoslavianrepublicofbosniaandherzogovina. You'd have to continue it on the next business card.

Now, China has connectivity, still mostly going through tightly controlled gateways in Beijing and Shanghai, although there are some more open paths to universities and to Hong Kong. I'd note that the Chinese government has been a less than ideal Internet citizen in other areas.

A number of .cn based service providers willingly host spam generators. At various times, the government appears to have tolerated at best, and actively encouraged at worst, malicious hackers that would deface or disable websites over some political protest.