In an interesting development from Google’s new censored search results in China, Google and Yahoo have both been invited by Congress to speak. The Congressional panel will be looking at broader issues of freedom of speech and the Internet in China. It’s not clear what this entails, since the United States Congress obviously has limited ability to effect either companies behaviors outside of the US.
The first step will be a briefing on February 1st in which the Congressional Human Rights Caucus will question Google and Yahoo about what their measures to block the controlled information are and about the pressures they have received from the Chinese government.
Nobody knows yet what will happen - Microsoft and Cisco Systems were invited as well and have already declined to speak. Google and Yahoo have not yet responded officially.
We’ll certainly keep following up on this situation as it develops!
Sergey Brin, Google co-founder has stated that he "understands why people are upset about his firm’s new policy in China" — ZDnet.co.uk reports this as a defense of the decision. But is it really a defense? The article states:
"I didn’t think I would come to this conclusion — but eventually I came to the conclusion that more information is better, even if it is not as full as we would like to see," Brin told Reuters in an interview in Switzerland.
Is Brin really defending the policy? It seems like all he’s admitting to is that a decision was made in a situation where there was no perfect solution, according to Google’s principles.
So, Google has moved into China . . . or at least, part of it has. In order to tap this admittedly enormous and rapidly growing market, Google has made a very unusual concession. While simultaneously fighting against a subpoena by the US government, requiring them to provide certain data from their search database, they have agreed to censor their database within China at the request of the Chinese government. Among the topics censored are pornography, sexual health, teen pregnancy, homosexuality, beer, and jokes.
A tough position, admittedly – since Yahoo and MSN have already moved in, Google was left at a decided disadvantage: to either ignore the potential of the Chinese market, or violate their principles by allowing censorship. Well, Google is a business, deep down, and their business principles are likely to win. The Chinese market is currently estimated at 110 million – and there can be no question that in a country of 1.3 billion, this market will grow.
It’s also interesting to note that the censorship is not entirely logical - but, that is the way of an algorithmic tool. It will take some fine tuning to convince the search algorithm that Essex County is NOT a pornographic website, despite the presence of the word "sex" in the title!
This is an intriguing developmen - comments, anyone?