Don't Be Evil?

The idea that the market and democracy somehow go hand in hand is one of the great fallacies of our time which has been repeated often enough to be believed. The reality is they can often barely co-exist.

Throw into this miasma the belief of the de-politicised western youth that the internet is the font of all our freedoms and you've got a problem. Watching Google propping up the corrupt Chinese government shows how the West tackles these issues, er, head on. The worldwide press freedom group, Reporters Without Borders said: “The launch of Google.cn is a black day for freedom of expression in China.”

The new interface - google.cn - started at midnight last night and will be slowly phased in over the coming months.

Media Guardian writes: "Despite a year of soul-searching, the American company will join Microsoft and Yahoo! in helping the communist government block access to websites containing politically sensitive content, such as references to the Tiananmen Square massacre and criticism of the politburo. China is thought to have 30,000 online police monitoring blogs, chatrooms and news portals. The propaganda department is thought to employ even more people, a small but increasing number of whom are paid to anonymously post pro-government comments online. Sophisticated filters have been developed to block or limit access to "unhealthy information", which includes human rights websites, such as Amnesty, foreign news outlets, such as the BBC, as well as pornography. Of the 64 internet dissidents in prison worldwide, 54 are from China."

Reporters Without Borders wrote to Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin in May last year asking if they were going to censor their tool for the Chinese market and expressing concern at some recent Google decisions.

In July 2004, the firm took a share in the Chinese firm Baidu, which operates a highly-censored search-engine. Soon afterwards, Google was allowed to open an office in China under a conditional agreement with the authorities. So what does it tell you if the thing that is held up as an icon of freedom and information sharing turns out to be propping up the worlkds most repressive and corrupt regimes? State capitalism and state communism, two peas in a pod.

Full article here...
Meanwhile over in the Land of the Free (sic) Timoth Carr points out that: "After destroying TV and radio, mega-media corporations are scheming to control what content you can view and which services you can use online. Streaming video, Internet phones, podcasting and online games are the future of the Internet. But companies like Verizon, AT&T and Comcast want Congress to let them deliver only their own products at super-high speeds ... while sticking the rest of us in the slow lane.This predatory scheme would be a dead end for independent voices and Internet innovators: bloggers, producers, and any new channels and services that might compete with the conglomerates."

The only way to stop them is to raise hell right now: Tell Big Media and Congress: Hands Off Our Internet. More at Free Press here.

2 comments

i saw this this morning and thought right away that the coverage of it was disgraceful.

unless real activist pressure is put on, they are going to try and slip this sort of stuff over here

left by michael the tubthumper on 25 January 2006

Yeah the coverage seems to be, thats the only way for western business to give some scraps of liberty to the Chinese.

left by Gus on 25 January 2006