Google won't censor china, what hope Conroy?

Submitted by James Purser on Mon, 22/03/2010 - 22:05

Google has just announced that as of right now, they have ceased providing a specially filtered search service for the Chinese mainland, rather they are redirecting each request for google.cn to google.com.hk, where the requirement for filtering doesn't exist (AFAIK).

This is a big step for Google and it's going to have repercussions for other nations that seek to censor their internet feeds, such as Australia.

Think about it. If Google is ready to ditch a 35% share of the search market in China over filtering, the chance that they are going to meekly follow government directives in other, smaller markets is quite small, especially if all they need to do is redirect users to other search facilities in nations with more open internet regimes.

This should give Conroy and Co pause for thought. They've already admitted that their plan isn't actually going to be useful by any meaningful measure (it won't reduce the distribution of child pornography, it is trivially circumventable and there is massive public disquiet over the concept of a hidden list of sites and urls). Having Google (the company that everyone goes to for search) turn around and say "ya boo sucks to you" is just going to leave a whole heap more egg on the face.

You may not be a fan of Google, and they certainly didn't win any friends when they announced that they were going to censor the feed into china, this move is certainly a step in the right direction back towards the "Don't be evil" ideal that is often attributed to them.

[UPDATE]

The government has released the submissions into its consultation on "measures to increase accountability and transparency for Refused Classification material".

Despite the fact that many of the links to the submissions appear to be broken due to simple typos (/ is fine on the internet, \ isn't). I managed to acquire (yes it took all of two seconds) Googles submission to the consultation.

As expected, Google pretty much tells the Government that it will not be party to overly broad restrictions that go beyond the letter of the law, and that it opposes the mandatory ISP filtering proposal on both technical and societal reasons.

Google has already shown that it's willing to forgo profit to uphold it's ideals (pissing off the chinese government is not something a tech company does lightly by the way), Conroy would be foolish to discount Google doing something similar here in Australia.

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Comments

Submitted by Lindsay Holmwood on Wed, 24/03/2010 - 12:45.

You have to take into account that Google's moves in China could very likely be a cunning business ploy to save face from a fairly epic business failure. 

Note that before they entered the Chinese market they said they reserved the right to pull out if they felt the Chinese were meddling too much. They dicked around and Baidu ate their lunch, and now they're up shit creek they've pulled the "China is bad, freedom is good" card, thus looking like champions of free speech to the western media.

Google is just another business and will always follow profits. If that includes censoring free speech (which they've been doing in China for years without any problems), so be it.

I wouldn't take Google's stance in China to be indicative of their future actions here in Australia. If they stand up to the Australian government and pull out of the country completely that would make me stand up in my seat, but I can't realistically see them doing that. 

Submitted by James Purser on Wed, 24/03/2010 - 23:21.

 Sure, China was always going to be a difficult play for Google, and yeah this could be a cynical exercise to hide the failure of Google to really pwn the Chinese search market. On the other hand it is still a very public rebuke of the chinese system of censorship from a very large american company at a time when most American companies are ignoring such things in order to capitalise on the growing Chinese middle class market.

As I said, Google did not earn any friends when they decided to enter the Chinese search market and play nice with the CCP censorship regime. They were attacked from all sides for putting commercial considerations ahead of ideals such as freedom of speach.

As to their future actions in Australia, while the action in China is an indication that Google is willing to take commercial pain (losing 35% of the Chinese market isn't exactly a drop in the ocean), I'm more looking at their public statements with regards to the Australian filtering proposal. So far nothing has indicated to me that they're willing to co-operate with the Government beyond the exact letter of the law, and if the Government tries to push them, they've shown that they can and will work around that.