Google's Outta Here
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Submitted by MsExPat on Thu, 01/14/2010 - 7:09am
My colleague Rebecca MacKinnon explains why that's a good thing.
To be honest, I was shocked that Google decided to get a spine and stop censoring its service into China. (They'd been blocking info that was "sensitive" to the Chinese government, like Tienanmen Square).
Kudos to 'em. In 2005, the guys at Yahoo, as you may recall, actually opened their files to the Chinese government, and gave the Chinese private emails that helped convict a journalist of "divulging state secrets."
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Comments
Emptywheel on Google vs China
may be more serious than previously supposed.
google doesn't give a shit about human rights
as their work with the ChiComs over the last five years demonstrates.
no, they're getting out b/c of industrial espionage concerns. i guess the ChiComs have better hackers, and google doesn't think the ~300M/yr they were making in China worth it, in the face of that.
Or privacy
My initial reaction was hooray as well. Digging a little deeper:
Rushkoff on Goog
Goog is a corp. Follow the money and you are likely to be nearer the truth.
It's still a win/win
I'm not quite as cynical about this as you seem to be. Yeah, I think Google's made the calculation: "we tried to play by your rules, and you cheated so we're not going to play by your rules anymore because that's a losing game for us."
But that is a calculation that no major foreign corporation doing business in China has made to date. Even when Chinese companies rip them off for intellectual property and do industrial espionage on them. (For more on this , I recommend this excellent book by Paul Midler.)
So Google, while watching out for its own business interests, has also drawn a major line in the sand. Which happens to also support human rights and Internet freedom. (Which, I'd argue, is a business climate Google needs to support in order to maintain global credibility) Win/win, as far as I can see.