Protestors beg Google not to build censored Project Dragonfly search engine A small handful of protesters turned up outside Google’s London HQ today to protest against the ad company’s censored search engine, developed as part of an unholy bargain to gain access to the Chinese market. Gloria Montgomery, director of the Tibet Society, told The Register outside Google’s King’s Cross offices: “We didn’t …
That alternate Google logo incorporating the Chinese flag... they should have used the wrong Chinese flag to wind-up China as well.
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...because if there were (shock, horror) an outbreak of lasting democracy in China, that democratic government would undoubtedly decide to hold accountable those foreign companies who knowingly collaborated - both formally through its courts, and informally as people would reject Google's offerings.
At the moment you'd have to say there's no sign that democracy is going to arrive any time soon. But one day it might.
Truly Google wants to "make a buck" and their CUSTOMER (China) wants something specific. Can you blame them for wanting to do business?
Ethical questions regarding business choices aside, SOME businesses are ostracized and criticized and even SUED for sticking to THEIR "morality" (at least in the USA).
So which is it for Google - do the 'Dragonfly' for their customer, because they're NOT putting morality in front of business? Or do NOT do the 'special' search engine, thus "discriminating" against them?
Rock meet hard place. Damned [whether you do or do not].
A good part of the problem is the blatant hypocrisy of the whole situation. Not many companies presumed of having an official "don't do evil" policy
Of course they dropped that motto when they decided they wanted to maximize profit at any cost... and yes, maximizing profit is the whole ethos of any self-respecting capitalist company, but pretending they have a moral compass, and then getting in bed with the Communist Party of China is what got them in *that* hard place to begin with
IMO in its true meaning 'hypocrisy' cannot be applied to businesses involving more than one. It is the job of the marketing department to say whatever is within the law to attract customers. From there down, it all depends on the feedback loops, whether the business follows through. And if the marketing campaign used vague terms, you can almost guarantee there's no business sense to follow through.
The dictators in Beijing are NOT the customers.
Google are just being greedy wimps; if the Pirate Bay can survive the server seizing and IP blocking, so can the world largest search engine, they could afford (and have the tech), to have a billion IP redirects running at a time, and no way could the GFWoC stop all of them; hell, I managed to get through from Beijing for half an hour before getting blocked again, without even using a VPN service.
Anon, cos I have relatives there.
I don't think you understand the technology behind the great firewall. For all intent and purposes, there is only one data link going out of China, and they only let through the traffic that they like. If they don't recognize the IP, it doesn't go through.
I posit that with leadership changes here in the west (possible but not likely) that each country or blcic could demand their own version of Google. I wonder what Google would do then? The quest for profit usually leads to a company willing to do almost anything for it to keep the shareholders happy.
Many search results are already blocked on Google products in Germany, in Turkey, in Saudi Arabia, many other places, in the USA Google is taking down millions of search results by complying with that supposed copyright law that they have over there. And every day Google is pretty much filtering out billions of pages and it varies in every country, that's pretty much how a search engine is working. And Google gives back door access to users Gmail and other private data to law enforcement in the USA every single day. In China supposedly they want to block search results on the tiananmen stuff, who cares really.
That's another thing I don't get—compared to the things Google/Alphabet/et al. do in other countries including censorship of search results, are people just blind to how things really work, or seeing what they only want to see? It's no secret China is responsible for lots of bad stuff and censoring it is morally questionable, but other countries demand that of Google all the time.
The problem is the platform. Until Google is challenged and it stops making money, it will never stop.
It's not far from that already, is it? Most obviously here in the EU Google is forced to block search results under the "right to be forgotten" that are freely available elsewhere in the world. I'm not equating the Chinese and EU governments in terms of human rights, but every company has to abide by the laws of the country they're operating in - or not operate there at all.
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