Michael Zimmer.org

Starting today, users visiting Google.cn will be redirected to Google.com.hk, Google’s Hong Kong search portal, where search results will be provided free from the filtering Google had previously been performing on Google.cn. Google is touting this as ending censorship in China, but, as Siva Vaidhyanathan has pointed out, that really isn’t the case. It’s an end-around. A slight-of-hand.

While Google is trying to do the right thing here, and it hopes it can deliver unfiltered results to China from Google.com.hk (or force China to take some kind of action against the Hong Kong site). But I fear this move will instead result in further failure to serve the interests of Chinese Internet users, and another lost opportunity to fight oppressive online censorship.

News reports indicate that Google will begin providing free music downloads in China.
Apparently Chinese Internet users have grown so accustomed to downloading music online, that piracy and illegal downloading has impacted music sales there more than even what the RIAA claims to be such a huge problem here in the U.S. Relatedly, Google has been struggling to take market share away from Baidu, the leading Chinese search engine.
The win-win solution seems to be for the music companies to join forces with Google to create a free music download option for …

John Palfrey and Jonathan Zittrain have published a wonderful opinion piece at CNet about how Internet companies struggle with certain “gray zones” of complicity with oppressive regimes and their desire to filter and censor Web content. They try to provide answers to the question “what’s a corporation to do” when confronted with requests that are “squarely at odds with the law, norms or ethics of the corporation’s home country”:
Should a search engine agree to censor its search results as a condition of doing business in a new place? Should …

Google has finally made the complete transformation. They are no longer some kind of benevolent, altruistic company trying to help people learn and grow by providing access to knowledge online. Now, they’re just one of many .com companies trying to build some software applications and make a buck.
Here’s the story as I see it.
Google started as project by a couple of PhD students who thought searching for information online could be better. They built their tool, and proclaimed in the paper announcing their innovation that advertising has no place in …

Philipp Lenssen at Google Blogoscoped has published an unofficial Google Censorship FAQ where he answers over 35 questions related to Google’s censorship activities. Highlights include:
What does Google censor?
It depends on the country. In Germany, Google censors certain Nazi websites like Stormfront.org, for example. In the US, Google censors sites containing child pornography, Google’s Sergey Brin stated. In China, Google also censors human rights groups, like HRW.org (Human Rights Watch), but many other things as well, like “台独” (Taiwan independence), names of current and past presidents, names of locations, historical events …

An important press release came out this week regarding a coalition of Internet companies, IT providers, human rights organizations, and academics joining forces to address human rights violations enabled by technologies and practices by some of the member organizations, such as providing means of surveillance for regimes like China to identify and jail dissident citizens. From the release:
A diverse group of companies, academics, investors, technology leaders and human rights organizations announced today its intention to seek solutions to the free expression and privacy challenges faced by technology and communications companies …

Leslie Burger, the president of the American Library Association is helping Google celebrate Banned Books Week, taking place this year Sept. 23-30. Her post at Google’s blog encourages us to visit google.com/bannedbooks, where we can use Google Book Search to explore some of the best novels of the 20th century which have been challenged or banned.
This is a very cool portal to some of the books previously considered dangerous in our society. Too bad citizens in China can’t count on Google to privide similar access to unpopular ideas in …

Wikipedia has defied the Chinese government by refusing to bow to censorship of politically sensitive entries. Jimmy Wales also challenged other Internet companies, including Google, to justify their claim that they could do more good than harm by co-operating with China’s repressive policies, noting that censorship is:
antithetical to the philosophy of Wikipedia. We occupy a position in the culture that I wish Google would take up, which is that we stand for the freedom for information, and for us to compromise I think would send very much the wrong signal: …

Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo have undermined the rights of Chinese to freedom of expression through their actions in China, according to Amnesty International.”All three companies have, in one way or another, facilitated or colluded in the practice of censorship in China,” Amnesty said in a report, noting that these actions contradict the companies’ stated values. The full report, entitled “Undermining freedom of expression in China,” is available online in PDF.
[via PCWorld.com]

Wired News reports that Reporters Without Borders has labeled Yahoo the “strictest” censor in China:
Paris-based Reporters Without Borders said their tests showed that Yahoo.cn blocked a higher percentage of politically sensitive results than Google.cn or the beta version of msn.cn.
The tests were performed using 10 politically-sensitive keywords like “press freedom” or “human rights” on the Chinese versions of Yahoo, Google and MSN, as well as a Chinese-based search engine, Baidu.
“We simply found out that Yahoo was even worse than its local competitors,” said Julien Pain, RSF Internet Freedom desk chief. …

First, Google starts to censor results in China, making a mockery of its core values. Then they try to explain it doesn’t really matter, since no one is using the censored version of their website. But now that they’ve cowed to the Chinese government, the uncensored version of Google is reportedly blocked from within China. For lack of a better analysis: Duh!
On the heels of this, Sergey Brin seems to now admit that Google compromised their principles by helping the Chinese censor the search results for the Tiananmen Square protests …

The answer is yes.
In yesterday’s stockholder meeting, Sergey Brin noted that Chinese users haven’t yet flocked to the censored Google.cn service, noting that usage of Google.cn is just a fraction of one percent of Google searches in China, while the uncensored Google.com is still used for more than 99% of all Google searches. (Google’s primary argument for creating the censored version was that the user experience was awful on the Google.com site, which has to go through China’s firewall)
Brin was responding to a question from Amnesty International, and seemed to …

Part of Google CEO Eric Schmidt’s justification for being complicit with China’s censorship of search engine results is that Google does the same thing in Germany and France, so what’s the big deal with time around. Consider this recent statement:
Asked whether Google might try to persuade Beijing to change its restrictions, Schmidt said he didn’t rule anything out, but said it hasn’t tried to change such limits elsewhere. He noted that Google’s site in Germany is barred from linking to Nazi-oriented material.
“There are many cases where certain information is …

MSNBC has an article today where Google defends its cooperation with Chinese censorship. Choice quotes from CEO Eric Schmidt include:

“We believe that the decision that we made to follow the law in China was absolutely the right one,” Schmidt said at a news conference.
Schmidt said Google’s managers were stung by criticism that they accepted Chinese censorship, but said they haven’t lobbied Beijing to change its rules.
“I think it’s arrogant for us to walk into a country where we are just beginning to operate and tell that country how to operate,” …

At Monday’s panel on “The Ethics and Politics of Search Engines”, Peter Norvig, Google’s director of research, stated that Google is moving the databases they keep of Chinese searches outside of the country in order to prevent China’s government from being able to access the data without Google’s consent. “We didn’t want to be in the position of having to hand over these kinds of records to the government,” he said, according to reports.
I don’t fully understand how China would have access to Google’s databases without their consent, and I …