The Chinese debarcle with Google has just escalated a few notches, as Google re-routes its operations to Hong Kong in an effort to try and free up censorship of its Chinese search engine . But you have to question Google for ‘jumping in to bed’ with its unequal Chinese bedfellow , given that they did sign up for all the pre-conditions.
What I don’t quite understand is why Google agreed to the filtering of its searches in the first place. Obviously it was more to do with the urgency to secure a lucrative foothold in the burgeoning online search engine sector in China rather, than a more noble desire to share its information resources to the largest populous in the world.
Possibly Google were a tad naive in thinking it could be bring about a change in the Government’s mindset on censorship. Perhaps Google thought the arena of cyberspace might somehow dilute the resolve of the State over time. The upshot of their actions could result in a massive missed opportunity financially -Google could now lose out against other more commmercially driven competion in a market place that is growing at 40% per year.
Location Relocation
However this location change marks a more subtle retreat as Google seeks to restore its user control rather than an outright withdrawal altogether. The practical implications are that the search results are only filtered according to location rather than at source – so if we type in Dalai lama or Tienanmen in google.cn we are not blocked by the Chinese filters.
Google’s recent actions were triggered by the recent cyber attacks on Google’s Gmail servers – more specifically the accounts of Chinese Human Rights Activists. There is no doubt either way that China is determined to reinforce its ‘cyber walls’ to censor online forays into western liberalism, but also to protect itself against online internal dissident activity.
So perhaps the nature of the dispute does not appear quite as one-sided as initially portrayed by the media (i.e., western government agencies would never hack into emails would they?) and that we cannot always consider the global democratisation of the online environment as borderless and as a ’given’ in terms of everyone’s human rights.
Further info:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/8575476.stm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/asia-pacific/8582233.stm
