Salocin

Censorship and Google

Everyone's talking about Google's self-imposed censorship in China - the debate has taken on the usual attributes of hysteria and irrationality as people with more ideals than sense pass judgement before considering the alternatives.

Judging from the googleblog's transcript of google's testimony to the US House of Representatives, Google picked the most sensible of the paths available to it.

Go back a few years, and google was facing the total loss of its service in China. It was becoming impossible for anyone in China to connect to the Google server, and even when Google was available from China, certain queries didn't seem to make it through (say, Tiananmen Square, for example). Because of this filtering, the Google service in China was degraded, and Google themselves had no idea how their search results were being altered.

So Google were faced with a choice - either stand by their guns, be the defenders of absolute free speech, and have the Chinese government sabotage their service, or create a separate Chinese Google service, which could be selectively censored according to the wishes of the Chinese government, but maintaining a quality of service Google can be proud of in every other respect. What's more, the Chinese language service of the Google.com website remains available and uncensored, it's just firewalled out of existence from inside the country.

Ultimately, a group of idealists criticised Google for not making a stand. Fortunately, Google's idealists are smarter than their critics - they realised that it was better to improve access to information as a whole than to be excluded from the country entirely, and that if some censorship in the near term was the price that had to be paid, then so be it.

The extended consequences of Google's decisions are that censorship of the internet in China is now extremely visible, and that everyone's talking about it, putting renewed pressure on the Chinese government to adapt to a world where information is becoming increasingly difficult to control.

What Google's critics would have liked is for the company to be a bridgehead into China, forcing the completely free exchange of information in the country. This form of coercion would have backfired. What's more, it isn't right to put such expectations on a company - to ask them to make decisions that will hugely reduce their future profitability and negatively affect the wealth of all of their shareholders in order to make a political point - that is the province of our elected representatives.