Google Founder Says Company Wrong to Partner in Censorship with the CCP
Google Inc. co-founder Sergey Brin acknowledged Tuesday the dominant Internet company has compromised its principles by accommodating Chinese censorship demands. He said Google is wrestling to make the deal work before deciding whether to reverse course.
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“We felt that perhaps we could compromise our principles but provide ultimately more information for the Chinese and be a more effective service and perhaps make more of a difference,” Brin said.
It’s comforting to know that over four months after reneging on their company policy of “Don’t be evil,” Google is recognizing that their launch of their censorship site Google.cn contradicted their policies and mission. Keep in mind that Google has defended its partnership with the Chinese government repeatedly throughout the ordeal and never consulted Tibetans or Tibet Support Groups as to how an American company censoring results on political information that they so sorely need might affect them.
Google’s China-approved Web service omits politically sensitive information that might be retrieved during Internet searches, such as details about the 1989 suppression of political unrest in Tiananmen Square. Its agreement with China has provoked considerable criticism from human rights groups.
“Perhaps now the principled approach makes more sense,” Brin said.
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Brin said Google is trying to improve its censored search service, Google.cn, before deciding whether to reverse course. He said virtually all the company’s customers in China use the non-censored service.
“It’s perfectly reasonable to do something different, to say, ‘Look, we’re going to stand by the principle against censorship and we won’t actually operate there.’ That’s an alternate path,” Brin said. “It’s not where we chose to go right now, but I can sort of see how people came to different conclusions about doing the right thing.” [Emphasis added]
Wow.
Brin has recognized the validity of Google’s detractors criticisms, criticisms that have been present and right since Day One. Google is now finally considering reversing path. Clearly part of these considerations is the fact that Google.cn is a failing product that people don’t want to use. Shock of shocks, people inside China and Tibet don’t want to use a website that censors search results for the Chinese government. It turns out that information about politics, history, and religion are more important to people than being able to get weather reports and sports scores quickly.
Technorati Tags: China, Google, censorship, Tibet
But where was this sane thought when it mattered, back in January when Google entered into a partnership to deny the people of China and Tibet access to information about human rights, democracy, free speech, religion, and history? Recall Google defending itself with statements like this:
Our launch of google.cn, though filtered, is a necessary first step toward achieving a productive presence in a rapidly changing country that will be one of the world’s most important and dynamic for decades to come.
Or this :
In order to operate Google.cn as a website in China, Google is required to remove some sensitive information from our search results. These restrictions are imposed by Chinese laws, regulations, and policies.
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We are not happy about governmental restrictions on access to information, and we hope that over time everyone in the world will come to enjoy full access to information…We believe that our continued engagement with China is the best (and perhaps only) way for Google to help bring the tremendous benefits of universal information access to all our users there.
Google repeatedly resort to paternalistic, intellectually dishonest, and outright shameful arguments in defense of its decision. The company went so far as to equate censoring information on human rights and democracy in Tibet and China as morally on par with censoring Nazi hate speech or child pornography in Western democracies. Congressman Tom Lantos, a Holocaust survivor, undressed this defense:
I cannot begin to describe how disgusted I am by this particular argument. Because, in essence, it equates the vile language and evil purposes of Neo-Nazi groups and hate speech with content provided by the human rights activists of Falun Gong, by journalists and by democracy activists in China. There simply is no comparison between efforts of the democratically-elected government of the Federal Republic of Germany to move against hate-mongerers, and the Chinese regime cracking down on religious freedom, human rights and democracy.
But today, finally, we see Google recognize the failing of their partnership with the Chinese Communist Party. Google users have shown that they’d rather have the Chinese government censoring them than an American corporation doing it at the government’s request. My guess is Google has proven themselves much better censors that the CCP’s 30,000 internet police.
I hope that Brin will continue to move Google towards the right action they should have taken when China asked them to build them a cutting edge tool of repression. The status quo pre-Google.cn would be just fine for me. Google can be an upstanding citizen of the net and refuse to censor the search results of people who yearn for freedom and information. As blogger John Battelle wrote back in February,
[C]ompanies like Yahoo and Google don’t traffic in sneakers, they traffic in the most powerful forces in human culture – expression. Knowledge. Ideas. The freedom of which we take as fundamental in this country, yet somehow, we seem to have forgotten its importance in the digital age – in China, one protesting email can land you in jail for 8 years, folks.
We need to work to keep totalitarianism away from America’s information technology companies. A reversal by Google would make them a role model for other US tech companies like Yahoo, Microsoft, AOL, and Cisco who have also engaged in anti-democratic practices at the behest of the Chinese government. I’ve known all along that Google is better than this – a fact that made their action so much more painful to witness – and now they’re recognizing the extent to which they betrayed their corporate principles. Hopefully this newfound self-awareness carries through to a full shutdown of Google.cn in the near future.
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[...] Google co-founder Sergey Brin recently revealed that the company was likely to abandon its China-based search engine Google.cn due to censorship issues. Other sources have expressed the announcement as inevitable, and sources the recent Chinese governments threats to shut the service, less than 6 months after it’s debut. [...]
[...] Last June Brin announced that Google had “compromised its principles” in abandoning their “Don’t be evil” motto to partner with the Chinese government. Admitting that your critics had you pegged from Day One is well and good, particularly when the criticism levied against Google by Students for a Free Tibet, Electronic Frontier Foundation, and the Open Net Initiative. But if agreeing with your critics doesn’t lead you to change your behavior, then you have not yet reclaimed your principles nor made the right decision. From what was said yesterday a policy change seemed unlikely in the near future. Co-founder Larry Page said: “We always consider what to do. But I don’t think we as a company should be making decisions based on too much perception.” [...]
[...] Last June Brin announced that Google had “compromised its principles” in abandoning their “Don’t be evil” motto to partner with the Chinese government. Admitting that your critics had you pegged from Day One is well and good, particularly when the criticism levied against Google by Students for a Free Tibet, Electronic Frontier Foundation, and the Open Net Initiative. But if agreeing with your critics doesn’t lead you to change your behavior, then you have not yet reclaimed your principles nor made the right decision. From what was said yesterday a policy change seemed unlikely in the near future. Co-founder Larry Page said: “We always consider what to do. But I don’t think we as a company should be making decisions based on too much perception.” [...]