It’s too bad it took the Chinese Government botnetting Google in order to get them to realize the importance of free expression to a country like China, struggling to break bloodlessly free from the Chinese communist party. Google has decided to no longer censor the search results on Google’s Chinese portal. But it’s also embarrassing to me, as an American, to see how much care has been taken by Google not to piss off China in their wording of the official response.
…advocates of human rights in China appear to have been routinely accessed by third parties. These accounts have not been accessed through any security breach at Google, but most likely via phishing scams or malware placed on the users’ computers.
What Google won’t say here, and I don’t know why, is this. Who besides the Chinese government has an unhealthy interest in the e-mail communications of Chinese human rights activists? Those “third parties” Google mentioned were probably the Guoanbu and the MSS, two Chinese agencies that, if you’re a human rights activist (or a salvation-believing Christian), you do NOT want to mess with.
But Google is on the right track. Responding to China, saying they’re willing to shut down operations in China if the archaic Chinese governing class aren’t willing to cave on the issue of censorship, is a good move. But why wait until now? I was heartbroken when Google capitulated to China’s censorship demands in the name of the Almighty Buck. I even chided Google as un-American.
So putting teeth behind this fiasco–great move. I would advise the Obama Administration to take a cue from Google’s chief counsel, who wrote their official response, and grow some teeth of their own as Google has done. Hillary Clinton’s response from the Department of State was neither as informed nor as smart. In fact, I’d call it useless.
James Fallows adds that, at the end of the day, this decision doesn’t really hurt anybody except Google. It doesn’t deal a real blow to China, in his opinion, because Chinese Internet consumers are, generally speaking, not going to work too hard to get around the government’s censorship. As one Tweeter put it, it’s not Google withdrawing from China. It’s China withdrawing from the world. To me, that means Google is finally, thankfully, just doing the right thing.
