Posts Tagged ‘china’

Erin Burnett thows cold water on the Google Hero stuff…

Posted: March 23, 2010 by datechguy in internet/free speech, tech
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…she points out on Morning Joe that google gets only 1 1/2% of its revenue from China and has struggled there. She must have read this Wall Street Journal article on the subject.

So Apparently google is making lemonade out of lemons here. A pretty smart move.

Then again it doesn’t change the fact that it is the right thing to do so I’ll give them kudos anyway for taking the road less traveled by, as the Journal says:

Google is trying to continue to offer search services to Chinese users outside the purview of mainland Chinese law, a strategy that few other companies, even those who have expressed growing frustrations with doing business in China, are likely to follow. Google appears to be setting itself up to fight China’s rules on its own and to manage what is likely to continue to be a complicated relationship with Beijing as it tries to ensure the government allows it to maintain some of its operations in the country. “This is an elegant solution if it were to hold, but I’m not convinced China will allow this to continue,” said John Palfrey, an Internet scholar at Harvard Law School.

Could it also be that Google sees that China’s bubble might be ready to burst too? If so such a move has even greater rewards long term.

How to recognize dictators from quite a long way away #37

Posted: February 5, 2010 by datechguy in internet/free speech, opinion/news, tech
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They attack anything that facilitates the uncensored passing of information among people they rule:

Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez has announced that he now considers Twitter messages and social networking as terrorist threats. He is quoted in this Spanish-language news report as calling for more state control over the internet.

via who else but Glenn.

Meanwhile on the China Google front my favorite Free Speech Diva continues to speak up concerning China. And she describers her dream speech on the subject:

My dream speech would be about how the Internet poses a challenge to all governments and most companies (except those companies like Google whose business is built around that challenge). I would call on all governments to work together with citizens, companies and each other to build a globally interconnected, free and open network that enhances the lives of everybody on the planet, enables commerce and innovation by big and small players alike, makes everybody richer and freer, and improves all governments’ relations with their citizens by making government more transparent, efficient, and thus more credible and legitimate.

I would quote Benjamin Franklin, who wrote in 1759: “Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little Temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.”

The speech would remind us all that all power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely, and that American democracy was built on this assumption. The Internet empowers governments and law enforcement agencies as well as citizens, upstart candidates, and dissidents.

Somebody ought to write a book about that. If you care about free speech then you should be reading Rebecca MacKinnon.

Sean Penn could not be reached for comment.

China? Where have I heard this before…

Posted: January 13, 2010 by datechguy in internet/free speech
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Way back in the hiwired blog days I put up these posts concerning China and google when they first agreed to censor the net for China, contrary to their “Do no Evil policy”.

We covered China a lot in the HiWired blog days (and kudos to the bosses at HiWired back then for letting us do it) , in those days Yahoo and Microsoft were the primary villains.

Now Google may have had enough enough:

We launched Google.cn in January 2006 in the belief that the benefits of increased access to information for people in China and a more open Internet outweighed our discomfort in agreeing to censor some results. At the time we made clear that “we will carefully monitor conditions in China, including new laws and other restrictions on our services. If we determine that we are unable to achieve the objectives outlined we will not hesitate to reconsider our approach to China.”

These attacks and the surveillance they have uncovered–combined with the attempts over the past year to further limit free speech on the web–have led us to conclude that we should review the feasibility of our business operations in China. We have decided we are no longer willing to continue censoring our results on Google.cn, and so over the next few weeks we will be discussing with the Chinese government the basis on which we could operate an unfiltered search engine within the law, if at all. We recognize that this may well mean having to shut down Google.cn, and potentially our offices in China.

The decision to review our business operations in China has been incredibly hard, and we know that it will have potentially far-reaching consequences. We want to make clear that this move was driven by our executives in the United States, without the knowledge or involvement of our employees in China who have worked incredibly hard to make Google.cn the success it is today. We are committed to working responsibly to resolve the very difficult issues raised.

The statement is good but time will tell if it actually means anything.

Lileks tweats it best

Google lies down with dogs, wakes, does search for “flea treatment”

Nobody is telling me that they didn’t know stuff like this was going to happen or going on. I think that Plausible deniability just didn’t exist this time.

I hope I’m wrong, I hope it’s a real wake-up call but time will have to tell

I’m watching Obama’s Q & A live and noticed two interesting things…

Posted: November 16, 2009 by datechguy in internet/free speech, opinion/news
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First his assertion that problems can’t get solved unless the US and China agrees. This is a foolish statement, that suggests that we have to get Chinese approval or corporation on any move we want to make. Really dumb statement.

Now if we can get them to help on things fine but to suggest that without them we can’t solve problems is just nonsense.

Secondly he is talking about the freedom of the internet and how a totally free internet is a plus, he explained that an uncensored internet forces him to hear opinions that he might not agree with. Considering his administration’s full scales attacks on Fox News and Rush Limbaugh his statement is a real joke.

I swear to God this guy doesn’t believe that videotape, google or youtube exist.

We are rapidly reaching the point were it isn’t worth listening to what he has to say since rational people will assume he will be speaking idiocy.

Remember we did this to ourselves, the government we deserve.

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