Saturday, January 27, 2007

Google Comments on China Censorship Again

Forbes reports on statements on Google China censorship given by the Google co-founders at Davos:

Brin said he was instinctively opposed to the deal because he was born in the Soviet Union. “Having felt that kind of oppression, I would never have wanted to compromise in that direction.” His opinion changed, he said, when he talked with Chinese people about it. “They’re really proud of what China has accomplished. They feel that as much information as can go into China, the better off it is.”

I have three comments on this, not to debunk, but to balance Sergey’s words:

• I talked to other Chinese people who didn’t like Google’s censorship move, in fact, downright despised that Google was now working together with the Chinese government just like every other search engine in China already did. So apparently, opinions among Chinese were divided. (It’s impossible to be any other way, too, considering China’s size.)
• Google.com was accessible 90% of the time before Google.cn started with a self-censored search engine (according to Google’s own figures). So even when you just look at Google, there was already information getting into China.
• Google.com shows the title and snippet of pages which themselves may be censored in China. Google.cn does not show the title and snippet of such pages. Even when you consider that a Chinese ISP blocks the page anyway once you click on it – which may or may not always be the case – this means Google.com was (and is) at least disclosing parts of the information, whereas Google.cn is disclosing no such thing (they only disclose that something is missing, but won’t say what).

According to The Guardian, Sergey Brin also said that “On a business level, that decision to censor... was a net negative.” Larry Page however added, “We always consider what to do. But I don’t think we as a company should be making decisions based on too much perception.”

I believe Larry is referring to the perception that Google helped shape with their informal corporate motto they held for years. It was no coincidence that Google in early 2006 removed, and then changed, some of their help entries on censorship, only after people noticed they were not in sync with what Google was doing now. For some time, Google’s own perception clashed with their China move.

“Perhaps now the principled approach makes more sense,” the AP quoted Sergey around half a year ago. At the time, Sergey revealed that almost all the Google users in China still used the non-censored Google.com search.

In other news, Google, along with other tech companies as well as human rights organizations, is reaching out to create a code of conduct “to promote freedom of expression and privacy rights.”

[Thanks Brinke Guthrie!]

Google Comments on China ... by Philipp Lenssen | Comments (8)

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