No Evil doesn’t mean All Good
So Google’s censoring the Internet for China — turns out Google’s philosophy of not being evil doesn’t mean they have to be good. Turns out they’re happy to sit on the fence with the rest of the spineless capitalists (read: Yahoo! & MSN) and do whatever the biggest-potential-market-the-world-has-ever-seen tells them to do.
Update: Censorship in action - Normal Google vs. Google China.
(Scary censhorship example stolen from Planet PHP.)
Update 2: Evidently Google agrees: “Filtering our search results clearly compromises our mission.” (Thanks to Dan for the link.)
Tags: Politics
January 27th, 2006 at 12:54 pm
This is a very interesting editorial from Bill Thompson at the BBC.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/4654014.stm
He points out that Yahoo and MSN both filter results. MSN shut down a blog by a Chinese blogger and Yahoo even handed over the identity of a blogger to the authorities. He also talks about how the United States and the UK have restricted what can and cannot be hosted, downloaded or transmitted on the internet. The difference with google.cn is that it tells you when something is being restricted by local laws.
January 27th, 2006 at 1:36 pm
That is a good article. The point I was trying to make was that Google never promised to do good. They just said they won’t be evil. Is the censorship evil? Probably not. Is it good? Definitely not.