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No More Googly Eyes

February 16th, 2006 by chris 3 Comments Tags:

The reactions to Google setting up shop in China are funny to watch. I wrote about Google China a while back, so won’t repeat too much. But the Google boycotts are great theater. The contortions people will go through to pat themselves on the back as caring global citizens…

I don’t get it. Google not offering any services in China, good. Google offering services following Chinese law, bad. Chinese users with search facilities that give no indication of censoring (i.e. pre-Google), good. Getting the same results with a notice that search results have been censored, bad.

Or is it that Google makes money off the venture and they themselve shouldn’t do business in China? To what end? Does anyone really believe that will be a stick to change the nature of China’s censorship policies? And the same people would still be complaining even if Google had no monetary stream at all.

In my opinion, it is much more effective to provide the legal search to Chinese citizens and <em>let them know when results are being held back</em> than to toss rose petals into the canyon and wait for the echo, which is about how effective simply ignoring the problem is… and that’s all Google was doing before. It’s not as if they were some great rights advocate gone bad. Why did these caring folks love Google when Google didn’t care one way or another?

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3 Responses to “No More Googly Eyes”

  1. D'Arcy Norman Says:
    February 16th, 2006 at 7:28 pm

    Yeah, that was my take on it, too… Easy to knee-jerk and say Google Is Evil! but, the alternative is worse. Some information is better than no information.

  2. Stephen Downes Says:
    February 17th, 2006 at 8:50 am

    There is a big difference between:

    - Google offering services to China, which would be available to all, except that they are censored by the Chinese government

    - offering services where the censorship is undertaken by Google itself

    In the first, you are doing your best, under difficult circumstances. In the second, you are yourself the cause of the difficult circumstances.

  3. chris Says:
    February 17th, 2006 at 8:56 am

    But which is Google doing? It seems a semantic difference: they are offering search and the censorship is being enforced by the government… same result whether they are given the list to censor or it’s done for them. At worst they are not helping to change difficult circumstances. At least their search tells the citizens of China when something has been removed, which Chinese search does not. I’m not going to crucify them for that.

    But if I did, I would need to do the same for all the other companies that have acted similarly. So, goodbye Yahoo and Microsoft too (among MANY others).