Wednesday 13 January 2010

Google: fearless defender of civil liberties?

I think not.

Google has announced that it's thinking about withdrawing the censorship it agreed to when it started in China. Chinese searches on certain sensitive topics (politics, sex, religion) return no results, as the result of an agreement between the company and the Chinese authorities.

Google has announced that, because sophisticated hackers (implication: the Chinese government) have accessed individuals' e-mail accounts, it's going to uncensor its operations, or leave China.

So: instituting censorship in pursuit of profit = absolutely fine. Hacking, on the other hand, is a no-no. It's not exactly a principled stand from the company, whose motto is 'Don't Be Evil'. I think this is the relevant point:

Evgeny Morozov, an expert on the political effects of the internet and a Yahoo fellow at Georgetown University, questioned why Google had made the decision after four years.
"They knew pretty well what they were getting into. Now it seems they are playing the innocence card ... It's like they thought they were dealing with the government of Switzerland and suddenly realised it was China," he said.

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