The China Situation: When Politics, Business And Culture Clash
from the ain't-no-easy-solutions dept
For obvious reasons, a lot of folks are talking about the China situation, concerning how big American companies are participating in the government-mandated information blocking. This isn't a new issue. It's been discussed for years. However, with the high profile move of Google entering China, suddenly Congress felt it needed to do something. The reports on the hearings are pretty much what you'd expect. Mock outrage with explanations and discussions of tradeoffs. Much ado about nothing, basically.What may be much more interesting is the response on all sides. On the US side, there's the question of whether or not this is simply mixing business and politics, and whether the government should be able to try to influence policy in foreign countries via private companies. Over in China, however, there are a few surprises. What's gotten the most attention is China's decision to openly defend its position, claiming its no different than US or European policies trying to protect online users from things that may be dangerous. However, much more surprising, is the news that a number of Chinese politicians are warning the government that taking censorship too far is dangerous -- showing a level of political discourse that often isn't made public.
It's that last piece that provides a good point of discussion. Bill Gates has basically said that China's censorship policy wouldn't work anyway, so there's no use getting upset about it. Realistically, though, all the discussions and issues of moral relevancy and such are distractions from the core issue. It's a question of intent and impact. The intent is always about "protection." In the US it's protection from things that the US government feels is dangerous: porn and such. In China it's protection from things that the Chinese government feels is dangerous: political upheaval. However, the impact is important. Any kind of blocking online presumes that if this kind of information is blocked, everything will be fine. The "issue" goes away. Unfortunately, the reverse is often true. The "issue" simmers and tends to get worse because no one deals with it, and no one is able to talk about it and come up with ways to really deal with it. Jennifer Granick has an excellent piece at Wired News pointing out that everyone's going to be offended by something online. Creating the perfectly unoffensive internet would kill it. So, instead of worrying about that, wouldn't people be a lot better off if, instead of trying to "protect" everyone, we taught everyone how to "protect" themselves -- and understand that not all content online is good? Plenty of it is bad -- but if you learn how to understand the content and put it into context, the impact of the "bad" content can be greatly minimized. And that applies everywhere. The governments won't pay attention, of course. They often have different, much more political, motives. However, if people learned how to be more self-sufficient when it came to understanding and processing information to protect themselves, there'd be a lot less need for governments to feel the need to step in -- for whatever reasons.
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Destructive Fads
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Re: Destructive Fads
The main concern with censoring material on the internet in China is this: Information is power. The logic is, if we can can keep people from reading out certain ideas, then the people will not be able to be inspired by them.
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Re: Destructive Fads
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Re: Destructive Fads
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Re: Destructive Fads
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Those Bastards
(sarcastic)I thought we were spreading Democrasy, we need to bomb them because they are blocking content to they people, we need to go an liberate them, because they people want this. Who cares if we kill several million of inoccent people, I mean its worht the cause right. They need the freedom of information so we need to make a plot and attack our own army ships and blame it on china so then we can have a reason to go liberate them and spread bullets .. I mean freedom.. I mean whats another war... I call for regime change
Im sure this is what Bush thinks..
Lets cace it, other contries have their own ways, just accept it, its no big deal and leave it alone.
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Uncle Sam is at it again
The answer is simple. Uncle Sam wants control of the internet, and that means getting power over search engines. Google has already snubbed their noses at the Bush administration by deciding not to comply with a search warrant that could have disclosed key information about how search results are displayed.
Imagine for a moment that the CIA learned how to manipulate search engine results by reverse engineering the Google algorithim that ranks pages. If the CIA or White House could push certain keywords and websites to the top of searches through manipulation, they could more effectively conduct psychological operations if they wanted to.
Google for their part is following the lead of many other Fortune 500 companies by complying with Chinese government regulations and censorship laws. The ONLY reason it's getting so much attention now is that Uncle Sam is trying to get any kind of leverage it can over the internet's golden boy, Google.
Prediction: Uncle Sam will push it's anti-google propoganda until Google gives them what they want. Google will probably lose the warrant fight and hand over a few terrabytes of data for the NSA to crunch.
But it wouldn't be the most corrupt thing they have ever done: http://deseretnews.com/dn/view/0,1249,635160132,00.html
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No Subject Given
So, the United States can spend untold effort trying to protect intellectual property without success and the Chinese government will spend untold efforts to censor what information it's population can access without success.
I'll wager that China smartens up and throws in the towel on censorship before we smarten up and throw in the towel on building same-day-cracked protection tools.
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Re: No Subject Given
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Business, as usual
and proclaims how capitalism and commerce are the foundations of freedom and democracy
it will be time to remind him that Chinese commie thugs and American industry are working hand-in-glove
to achieve authoritarian control and monitoring of millions of oppressed individuals.
Has anyone bothered to ask any of those millions whether they want to be continually corraled under Big Brother's microscope?
The more business gets in bed with government, the more individuals get the shaft.
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