This post is about the fundamental battle between good and evil that might/might not go on inside the boardroom of a megacorp like Google.
First, a bit of background info.
China’s single-party communist government has been quite diligently censoring any and every form of media in the country. Newspapers and TV channels are more often than not under government control, and even those which are independent have to comply with very strict content filtering policies.
What this effectively means is that any person in China who receives any kind of information whatsoever, is only doing so after complete approval of the Chinese government.
For further reading, I suggest you read the book Nighteen Eigty-Four by George Orwell…
This form of throttling extends into the Internet as well. Maybe you’re heard of the Great Firewall of China, which are great huge website filters installed at all ISP nodes with the rest of the world. Any content deemed unsuitable for the public, is simply added to the Block list, and hey presto, problem solved. This keeps dissent and dissatisfaction at a minimum in China apparently.
Non-Chinese web companies trying to make inroads into the nation are forced to comply with these stringent rules as well, often being forced to create separate portals for their Chinese visitors, which is often radically removed from the standard website.
Case in point is google.cn, the Chinese portal for Google. It’s forced to comply with local laws, and so, is forced to censor content from its search results. Not only is this bad on face value, but the fact that some people might be lulled into a sense of surety that the search results they’re receiving are not tampered with is a crime in itself.
In fact, Chinese government officials have the right to quiz Google about user account information whenever they want. And when stuff doesn’t work as planned, they simply hire hackers to get the information they need to prosecute any dissidents. Many companies like Google and Yahoo! have come under attack for complying with these laws. The companies defend themselves by saying that they have no option but to comply if they are to continue operations in the country.
Well that is about to change…Google has officially announced that it will be no longer censoring its results. A spokesperson said that Google will ‘enter into discussions with the Chinese government to explore the possibility of an uncensored search engine’, and this request is almost certainly going to be denied, which effectively means that google.cn will be no longer accessible by the general public. Google also said that it might go a step further and down the shutters on all of its offices in China as well.
Its interesting to note where the battle might go from here on…I will be keenly following this story, and will post updates…