So generally I don’t mind Google.
Apart from the occasional slap that is.
They send me traffic, Adsense checks, organize my email pretty well, let me find new niches and so on.
But today, I’ve lost all respect…
It’s mega old news (3 years ago?) but I’ve only just learned recently that Google did a deal with the Chinese government to give them a version of the search service that would omit all listings considered inappropriate by government officials.
In other words, helped the Chinese govt. restrict the free flow of information on subjects like Taiwanese independence or the Tianamen Square massacre and in doing so participated in repressing “the world’s information” rather than “organizing” it as their mission statement reads.
The company who by their own admission lives by the principle of “do no evil”…
Obviously there’s big money in the deal so it shouldn’t come as a surprise, but the thought of them going to all that effort (well I guess it probably wasn’t much work) to make the search software restrict all the right terms… when they could have so easily just said no…
It’s disgusting in my books and I know I’ll never look at G the the same.
It also leads to the question of how “natural” really are the search engine rankings we see?
If they’re willing to take money to alter the search results for a foreign government, what might they do with the search results in America for the US government? (to which by the way CEO Eric Schmidt is now a technology adviser!)
Scary huh?
Whaddya think folks?
P.S. A little more about the move at this (old) article
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As you said, there’s huge money to be made in the China market. China now has the largest population of internet users (even higher than US in absolute terms).
To derail Baidu.com as the no.1 search engine in China, Google has to do something “evil”. It’s all about gaining market share for them now, which the money will follow on if they succeed.
It’s not just China, they have admitted that they blacklist sites in the UK that speak out against the government.
6 months ago you couldn’t find sites like infowars.com on google.co.uk, because they were overly critical of the British royalty and government.
It’s a brave new world…
Cheers,
Josip
guess china’s market share is too large for the big G to ignore, eh?
Just a side note, your blog could have been banned in China already, since you mentioned the forbidden word (Tianmen Square) here.. =)
grow up, andrew. u sound like perez hilton.
they alter searches for france, Uk and other govts as well. s’time they also filter searches in US as per limitiation of First Amendment. It is not upto Google to make laws, they follow laws just like all the rest.
If they don’t follow the law then govts filter it out in any case and make the pages unavailable etc. So it’s not like if google hadn’t buckled people in china would have known more about tinamen square. People wouldn’t have gotten access to the info while google would have been slow for everything else as well. So all i’ve to say to u is grow up!!
Thanks for your comments Courageous Anonymous,
I’m trying to work out the point you’re making.
Do you mean that because they also filter results in the UK or France that this makes it a LESS evil thing to do and that I shouldn’t be concerned about it?
Maybe the government would have filtered it out anyway, but how does that make Google’s behaviour less offensive?
They helped filter out information so they are an ACCESSORY to the repression of information and the restriction of freedoms.
Is it illegal? Probably not. Did they HAVE to do it? I don’t think so and I think it’s more than reasonable to criticize their behaviour for it.
Andrew