Wednesday, January 25, 2006

Google China addendum

My correspondent pete@fenelon.com adds rather sensible: "Something that nobody's yet pointed out about Google China self-censoring is that it's fairly pointless for it to return 'banned' search results anyway, as the 'Great Wall' firewall will block anything containing dangerous subversive content like "democracy" or "Taiwan" anyway.

What use is a search engine where most of the results you click on are
blocked by something else? ;)

Pragmatic move by Google, I'd say. No point searching for content you
can't look at in full."

Another interesting (and perhaps overly provocative, but I like that :-) point made on the Cyberprof mailing list was, why is it ok for the US to export its principles such as freedom of speech to China, but not for China to export its principle of the supremacy of the communist state's security over such freedom to a US company? they're all just values after all..

No comments: