By now anyone with half an eye open on the Internet knows Google’s China censorship story. While talking to a colleague recently I realized how badly the actions of Google have been misinterpreted, so here’s my little attempt at mythbusting the episode.
Myth: Google censored their website in China.
Truth: Google.com is still available to Chinese users. (Whether the Chinese government blocks it or not is another story). To allow Google to be available if the main site is blocked, they have offered a ‘censored’ version as Google.cn which follows local requirements.
Myth: Google reneged on their promise not to be evil.
Truth: Every search engine, including MSN and Yahoo! that operates in China has to censor results that are not acceptable to their government. However Google ensures that users know that they are getting filtered results, by mentioning it on every such result page.
Look at it this way: if people get only filtered results, they may be inclined to feel that those results reflect the truth, but if they are made aware that those results are filtered, then they will take the ‘truth’ with a pinch of salt.
Myth: Google did it so that they were greedy and wanted to profit from the huge Chinese market.
Truth: Google is a corporation and they are in the business of making profits. However they decided not to offer Blogger and Gmail in China because they did not want to compromise their users if records were requested. Not only that, they are also moving all search records out of China so that they will be inaccessible to the Chinese government. (Obviously it doesn’t want to repeat the Yahoo! episode where a blogger was sentenced to eight years after the company was made to provide evidence about him)
Then there’s the inevitable “If Google is not evil why should it continue to do business in China?”. That’s the equivalent of saying “Look here my Chinese friends, your government wants to give you only partial access to Google… so we in our infinite wisdom have decided that it’s better for you to not have any access to Google at all!”. The Internet was fine before Google and it will run fine without Google. If Google decides to stop operating in China, they will not not drop dead collectively – their life will go on as usual, and their search needs will be met by local companies like Baidu.com which will happily provide only the results that are acceptable to their government, without any intimation that there’s more to the truth than what’s available to them.
Many people are happy to see the great enemy in Google, but they are just following local law. Remember that they censor results in many countries as per local law (DMCA violations in the United States and Nazi-related pages in Germany and France), but in each case they ensure that users are aware of those takedowns. If you find these actions disturbing, rail against the laws that cause them, not the law abiding companies that have to follow them.
Related: Google’s official explanation of ‘censorship’ decision. A good read.
Posted by Anil on March 7th, 2006 :: Filed under
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