[Mb-civic] Google's China web - Frida Ghitis - Boston Globe Op-Ed

[William Swiggard]

  Google's China web

By Frida Ghitis  |  January 26, 2006  |  The Boston Globe

A FEW YEARS ago, I walked into an Internet room in Tibet's capital, 
Lhasa. There were no Chinese soldiers in the room, and no visible 
government censors nearby. A sign on the wall, however, reminded Web 
users that even after entering the stateless world of the Web, China's 
all-seeing eye had not disappeared. ''Do not use Internet," the warning 
instructed crassly, ''for any political or other unintelligent purposes."

Since then, China's ruling regime has perfected the science of 
controlling what the Chinese can read or write on the Internet to such a 
degree that it has become the envy of tyrants and dictators the world 
over. We might have expected that from a regime that has proven it will 
do whatever it takes to stay in power. What we never expected was to see 
Google, the company whose guiding motto reads ''Don't be evil," helping 
in the effort.

Google's decision to help China censor searches on the company's 
brand-new Chinese website is not only a violation of its own 
righteous-sounding principles, and it's not just an affront to those 
working to bring international standards of human rights for the Chinese 
people. No, Google's sellout to Beijing is a threat to every person who 
ever used Google anywhere in the world. That means all of us.

That's no exaggeration. Google saves every search, every e-mail, every 
fingerprint we leave on the Web when we move through its Google search 
engine, or its Gmail service, or its fast-growing collection of Internet 
offerings. Google knows more about us than the FBI or the CIA or the NSA 
or any spy agency of any government. And nobody regulates it. When a 
company that holds digital dossiers on millions of people decides 
profits are more important than principles, we are all at risk. Google 
will now participate actively in a censorship program whose 
implications, according to Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet and 
Society, ''are profound and disturbing." The government blocks thousands 
of search terms -- including censorship.

To be fair, Google is hardly alone in its decision to capitulate to 
Beijing's rulers in order to gain a Web share of China's 1.3 billion 
inhabitants. The country's tantalizing market has tested the ethics of 
many a Western corporation -- and almost all have failed the test. That 
is particularly true in the Internet business.

Just last year, Yahoo helped Beijing's Web goons track down the identity 
of a Chinese journalist who wrote an e-mail about the anniversary of the 
1994 Tiananmen Square massacre -- a massacre of thousands of Chinese 
democracy advocates perpetrated by the same regime whose efforts Google 
now abets. The journalist, Shi Tao, was sentenced to 10 years in prison. 
Reporters Without Borders labeled Yahoo an ''informant" that has 
''collaborated enthusiastically" with the Chinese regime. Microsoft, 
too, plays by the dictatorship's rules. Bloggers on MSN's service cannot 
type words such as ''democracy" or ''freedom." Internet users cannot 
read or write about anything that even hints of opposition to the ruling 
Communist Party. Even pro-Western commentary can trigger a block. And 
forget anything about Tibet or the Dalai Lama. Chinese bloggers, 
incidentally, must all register and identify themselves to authorities.

Neither Yahoo nor Microsoft claims to have higher ethical standards than 
the competition. The often-stated desire to ''do good" and make the 
world a better place was one of the traits that endeared Google to the 
public. It was one of the reasons we trusted them to guard the precious 
and valuable contents of their thousands of servers.

Now Google has become a company like all others, one with an eye on the 
bottom line before anything else. The company has decided to help 
China's censors even as it fights a request for records from the US 
Justice Department's investigation of online child pornography. Skeptics 
had claimed Google was resisting the request in order to protect its 
technology, rather than to protect users' privacy. That explanation now 
sounds more plausible than ever.

We've long known about China's disdain for individual freedoms. But 
Google, we hardly knew you. It's definitely time to rethink that Gmail 
account and demand some safeguards from a potentially dangerous company. 
Perhaps here, too, we will need to heed the Tibetan cybercafé warning, 
''Do not use Internet for any political or unintelligent purposes."

Frida Ghitis writes about world affairs and is the author of ''The End 
of Revolution: A Changing World in the Age of Live Television."

http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2006/01/26/googles_china_web/
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060126/f4007bea/attachment.htm