BEIJING (Reuters) – Internet giant Google, which has agreed to block politically sensitive items on its new China site, rejected Chinese newspaper reports on Tuesday that the new platform does not have the correct license.
The Beijing News reported on Tuesday that Google.cn, the recently launched service that accommodates China's censorship demands, "has not obtained the ICP (Internet content provider) license needed to operate Internet content services in China".
more: http://today.reuters.com/news/newsarticle.aspx?type=internetNews&storyid=2006-02-21T054300Z_01_PEK146281_RTRUKOC_0_US-INTERNET-CHINA-GOOGLE.xml&rpc=22
[Snipped to fair use portion, resolved tiny-URL...] |
On the homepage of Google.cn, you can see that :
©2006 Google – ICP 050124
with a link to http://www.miibeian.gov.cn/ (which have not a huge PageRank? with a link on google homepage? strange...)
if Google was in illegality, it didn't show that, I think. |
It's a classic setup.
Those familiar with the workings of totalitarian regimes will understand this as a message: "You'd better be good and do exactly what we say or we'll take away your license and your investment is gone".
The interest by Communist Party newspapers in Google's license is not likely to be accidential. It would have been dictated from the highest levels.
It's not that Google is necessarly doing anything in China to anger their masters in Beijing. But their crime in the Communist's eyes is to have gotten caught by the anger of people around the world, and particularly in the media.
The firestorm of criticism is likely being incredibly damaging to Beijing's doomed battle to suppress freedom of speech, and many Chinese are following the issue closely. Each day the subject of censorship in China is in the news is another nail in the coffin of tyranny, and the dictators know it. Every mention in the media, every whispered comment in China, every Chinese text message or blog or email is sunlight on the vampire.
Further, by giving Google a license only in the name of Ganji, the government may have set up in advance a planned, easy method of turning the screws--to claim that it was an oversight and to then use the opportunity to put pressure on Google to, perhaps, provide personally identifiable search data. Once Google is in fear that they may not be able to get a 'correct' license at all, they will be more likely to make "evil" deals that they never would have made before investing so much money in China.
Typical Communist tactics. Not very effective since "the horses are already out of the barn", but typical nonetheless. |
Today's news shows the screws are being tightened even tighter on Google. Communist Party newspapers are specifying the demands of the Beijing dictatorship.
"Do more evil" is what they are saying:
* Censor much more.
* Remove the statement of missing results for banned words.
* Invest even more money (so they can hold a greater amount of Google's money hostage to assure compliant behaviour).
* Block any Chinese access to Google.com (watch to see if that link on google.cn vanishes soon).
* Most of all the regime wants all the discussion about Chinese internet censorship stopped--obviously Google can't control that, but they are being punished anyway because it was the contradiction of their "do no evil" motto and their censoring in China that helped bring Chinese censorship to light so vividly.
Google is likely now deeply regretting and rethinking their China deal. The lure of easy profits brought them into China, but their mistake was trusting the Chinese government to act like a government in a free country.
The painful lesson is that all dictatorships (and criminals) routinely lie and take advantage of those gullible enough to trust them. As an example, the arms control agreements the US signed with the Soviets were violated on an incredibly massive scale. Once the Soviet empire collapsed, some Eastern European countries asked the US what to do with the treaty-violating missiles they had. Past is prologue.
Google now is now between a rock and a hard place:
Either abandon ship or "do more evil".
I have some sympathy for their current situation, but a bit of research could have told them that doing business with dictatorships is always dangerous. If you sleep with a tiger, don't be too surprised if one day you become it's breakfast.
Those who wish to turn a blind eye to the realities of the Nazi-like horrors of the Chinese Communist regime can fool themselves if they want, but as Google is finding out, the butchers in Beijing mean deadly business in crushing any discussion of freedom or human rights; so as to try to perpetuate their endangered and corrupt rule.
They may allow economic development, but they are NOT reforming on political freedom issues, instead becoming even more repressive as the Chinese increasingly demand real freedom. Their "Laogai" concentration camps are full of political dissidents. If you need an organ transplant, go to China and they'll shoot one just for you. Hideous. The Chinese products we buy help fund a military buildup designed to crush Taiwan and to become the successor to Imperial WW-II era Japan: seizing dictatorial control in Asia and the Pacific. A great many apparently independent companies in China are owned by the government--but not just any government agency, they are owned by the People's Liberation Army, which gets billions of it's war-machine funding from profitable sales of consumer products in the west. How did North Korea get their atom bomb? The plans and equipment likely came from China, which stole them from the US. Chinese nuclear cooperation with Iran serves their interests too--a nuclear attack by Iran on the West would let China take the Pacific without a shot. China never was what President Bush calls a "strategic partner"--in China's own military journals they advocate nuclear attacks on the US. THEY view the west as an enemy to defeat. We are blind to pretend otherwise.
30 minutes of research would have told Google enough to think twice about going to China.
The pressure on Google from the Chinese regime won't stop until they get exactly what they wanted all along. They won't settle for the "censorship with a human face" promise with which they lured Google into their trap.
My bet is within a week or two we'll see Google pull out of China rather than "do more evil". |
