Google's Evil Scale Apparently Now Includes Censoring Videos In Thailand
from the funny-how-that-works dept
Wondering why Google's board of directors recommended to shareholders that they vote down a proposal that would require Google to adhere to a set of standards against censoring the internet? Perhaps you just need to look to the situation in Thailand, where Google's YouTube property was lamely banned earlier this week over a single video that mocked that country's king. Apparently, the country is now getting ready to ditch the ban, but only because Google has promised to help them censor the video, not by pulling it down, but by making it inaccessible to viewers from Thailand. I guess on Google's famous "evil scale", censoring one video to make the rest of YouTube available is less evil than having no YouTube at all in Thailand.
Thank you for reading this Techdirt post. With so many things competing for everyone’s attention these days, we really appreciate you giving us your time. We work hard every day to put quality content out there for our community.
Techdirt is one of the few remaining truly independent media outlets. We do not have a giant corporation behind us, and we rely heavily on our community to support us, in an age when advertisers are increasingly uninterested in sponsoring small, independent sites — especially a site like ours that is unwilling to pull punches in its reporting and analysis.
While other websites have resorted to paywalls, registration requirements, and increasingly annoying/intrusive advertising, we have always kept Techdirt open and available to anyone. But in order to continue doing so, we need your support. We offer a variety of ways for our readers to support us, from direct donations to special subscriptions and cool merchandise — and every little bit helps. Thank you.
–The Techdirt Team
Reader Comments
Subscribe: RSS
View by: Time | Thread
Bigger evil
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Don't be Evil
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Google is just like everyone else in business
Keep in mind all companies conform to the laws and policies in other countries if they want to do business there. Yahoo, MSN, and many other well known companies help governments to censor the internet.
The paradox seems to be the fact that we seem to connect the Internet with freedom. Freedom is still a strong core value in the United States. It is a value we all can agree on.
The value based question seems to be how could a US corporation support something that seems to go against the very nature of freedom?
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Google is just like everyone else in business
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Re: Google is just like everyone else in busin
(This comment does not mean we should turn a blind eye to basic human rights abuse.)
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Which would you rather be: ethical or rich?
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Which would you rather be: ethical or rich?
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
This is a tough one...
I'd still lean slightly on the side that they are a company, and they are in business to make money, so they cannot be expected to take the values of the country they originated from (namely the US) and impose those ideals on the citizens of these other countries.
My statement above is barely enough to get me on the side of these companies, but what really does it is the fact that this restricted content is bullshit. If you really want to get somewhere on the Internet, you can. Period. Putting the infrastructure in place to allow access to US company websites will provide the "road to freedom" should those citizens choose it.
Only the citizens of the countries themselves can choose freedom (as we in the US see it) for themselves. We cannot impose freedom, Iraq has painfully taught us that.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: This is a tough one...
True, but that does not excuse collaboration with evil.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
It is convenient for employees to be able to assign moral responsibility to corporations, because they think that they are then absolved of it. It becomes very, very easy to perform unethical acts when you can say: "It's not me, it's XCorp. I'm just doing my job." And that's where the 'evil' comes from. Until others hold people accountable for their actions and dismiss this 'get out of jail free' card, corporations will always encourage immoral behaviour.
Corporations: No soul to save, no body to imprison.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re:
Well, legally they are amoral persons.
Sure they can. Getting them to be held accountable is another story.
And they legally often are.
One of the many advantages of incorporation.
Legally, corporate persons are superior to natural persons. Says something about the legal system, doesn't it?
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Your argument is based on the assumption that the world has *one* set of ethical beliefs, namely, the ones you have. The post you quoted said "you can't expect other countries to act the same way as america", basically. Your reply was "No you can't, but really, yes we should".
All you really did was swap "values" for "ethics", and restate the same point.
We cannot impose freedom,...
True, but that does not excuse collaboration with evil.
The world isn't black and white.
The choice here is between "no access for anyone in the world to this video" or "don't let Thailand see this video". It's either choose between them, or Thailand gets nothing. You can hardly put any blame on Google in this case. If you were in charge, what, exactly, would you do? Cut off access to the entire country over one video?
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
If you are all that worked up about conditions in China, bitch about it to your elected officials, but realize that they can't do a whole lot about it either. China is a superpower and can do pretty much what it wants. Its change will come from within, not from what Google can affect.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re:
Not if they can't do it ethically.
Yes and yes. But whether you can find someone better or worse doesn't really matter.
I concerned about the behavior of Google and I'll voice my concerns to whomever I please, thank you.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Maybe they should not do business in China. They make plenty of money without doing so.
Maybe we should stop outsourcing manufacturing to countries that treat their workers like slaves.
Maybe we should not buy goods from those countries.
Maybe we shouldn't shop at Walmart so much either.
Is that too much of a hardship for you? Is money the only thing that has meaning?
How are you going to buy anything when you don't have a job making stuff?
Life was pretty good here in the USA when we made most of what we consumed. We could do it again if we haven't lost the ability to. And if we lost it - then what are we?
Globalization is good for corporations, and for a few people. But is it good for our country? Is it good for the country that makes cheap shirts until an even poorer country takes that business away? It's a race to the bottom. China is now outsourcing some manufacturing to Vietnam.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Not being evil.
The fact that countries like Thailand and China are willing to block an entire domain (service?) like YouTube or Google just shows how out of touch they are are with the reality of the internet.
Google's putting their collective foot in the door by keeping it's entire service up, minus one video. What those governments don't get is sense the media exists on the net it could be easily posted to hundreds or thousands of different sites in seconds. I feel safe in saying most Thailanians who want to see it have been able to see it without access to YouTube. And in a week or two, after the original is removed, when the media attention has died down, there will be renamed reposts and hundreds of little homages to it in other videos, and i bet Thailand won't say a word.
And that is why Google can block the video without being evil. They kept it up until the entire country exposed itself as being threatened by a silly video on the net. Now that the entire word has been enlightened to the videos existence, it doesn't matter that a particular copy is blocked. And Thailand should feel a little embarrassed for making a scene and wasting everyones time.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Not being evil.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Google is doing its best to push worldwide communications and is offering better and less repressive services to those who otherwise would have nothing.
And for those of you living here in the great ol U.S of A ought to take a hard look at what freedom really means before electing another fuck-ass to ANY political office before pissing and moaning about the actions of the corporations who do what they do because of those officials YOU elected into office.
Get a life already for fucking Christ's sake.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
down with idealism
I also doubt very much that people in China say, "Damn you, Google, offering us a crippled service because of our oppressive government instead of no service at all."
Ideals are all fine and good, but no one is served by Google refusing to do business in restrictive countries except other online businesses that are willing to do business in those countries.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Consider this: If the operator of the whorehouse told the preacher that he could only come in and preach to the ladies while he using their services, would he be wrong to do so? Some here would appear to think not.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
When the shit hits the fan
The comparison between search and building engines for a war machine is a long stretch. The nexus occurs at the point where Google's pandering to the Chinese government allows the communists to rewrite their history, assisted by Google, to continue the enslavement of the population. The people, after all, are the heart of the war machine.
While I find Google's support of the communist government unconscionable from a moral standpoint, the experience (and tunnel vision) of American business executives in WWII shows us companies will follow profit regardless of the moral ramifications. Certainly Google's executive management is conscious of the fact that they would be fired if they ceded the Chinese market to Yahoo.
Protests and soapbox speeches against these things matter very little in our short-attention-span society. Look at what happened when this matter first came to public awareness. Politicians hauled CEOs of American corporations in front of Congress. The politicians publicly shamed the CEOs, who protested that they had to support the Chinese government to do business in China. It was a nice spectacle for those who cared. The result was no change. The CEOs went home and continued to run their companies the way the company owners want them too. The self-congratulated politicians mentally calculated the votes they had won for the next election and moved their attention to the ring in the circus.
The only way to give "moral guidance" to US corporations is to affect their profit. Protests and boycotts usually have only short-term effects. And they rarely target all companies equally. Such partial remedies only last as long as the media finds them interesting.
The only thing to do that will matter is to press for the passage of laws that restrict the activities of US companies in foreign markets with totalitarian regimes.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: When the shit hits the fan
The only way to open these countries up is for the citizenry to get a taste of other alternatives, as we did with the USSR, but thoughtful people can disagree on this point.
Also, we must bear in mind that citizens may not care to have a government like the US. They want jobs and food in their belly. Who are we to judge?
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
All Corporations seem to act the same way
"When the shit hits the fan, its called collaboration. I'm sure your parents, grandparents, and even great grandparents for some of you, were not happy to to find Ford and GM engines in Nazi trucks captured during WWII. Even as we went to war with Germany, Alfred P. Sloan, then chairman of GM, rationalized building the Nazi war machine as being highly profitable."
Thanks for having the balls to bring this up. It points out that we should not glorify everything corporations stand for. They have some good qualities and many bad in my opinion.
"The only way to give "moral guidance" to US corporations is to affect their profit. Protests and boycotts usually have only short-term effects. And they rarely target all companies equally. Such partial remedies only last as long as the media finds them interesting."
An economics solution will not work because it is not a truly free market. You don't like what a company is doing? Try their competitors until you find out they own them too :)
I don't know about giving the government the big bat either because they are far more likely to swing it at a minority than anything real.
Perhaps the law? any thoughts?
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Google are right, well sort of
Censorship is fine as long as it represents the majority view of the readership. So, most parents would censor the kinkythai website for example from their children. Most muslim countries will censor images of the profit Mohammed. But you would never accept Muslims censoring on behalf of Christians for example. It has to be the legitimate representative of the readership that makes the choice.
IMHO
The current Thai government does not represent the people so they have no legitimacy in making the censorship choice for Thailand, they are just arrogant men that nobody would vote for if they held a vote.
IMHO
What to do? A few words early in the coup would have swung it, but that opportunity was lost. This isn't the time to stand up and be ethical, some sort of ethical compromise has to be made.
IMHO
In my humble opinion, I have no right answer to this, Google were banned, if they choose to remove the one or two videos that the officials banned in Thailand then they remove the reason to ban youtube.
There is no single entity 'Thai people' and removing the easy excuse 'defamed the King' from Youtube fixes the *excuse* used to block Youtube.
*Small* voices are more important than *big* people would have you believe, and youtube is an outlet for the small voices. So it's overall better that they are in Thailand.
IMHO
They should remove the easy excuse and challenge further attempts to ban youtube. What are they afraid of?
IMHO
But then what do I know. This is just MHO.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Google are right, well sort of
And I'll just set the record straight quickly (in case anyone is still reading this thread).
The Thai king has been in power for decades, he is loved by his people and has had nothing to do with the military coup (at least officially).
The former government was corrupt and the people generally wanted them gone. The military overthrew the corrupt government in a bloodless coup to reinstate order and fair governance.
Whether or not this will happen, I have no idea (odds are not on the side of military rule), but the Thailand king was NOT just installed and was NOT a party to the coup (again, at least officially).
Eastern societies generally hold their royalty in high esteem and their local governments in contempt (opposite of the US... interesting, eh?). Disrespecting the king would not please many in Thailand: coup, hardship, or tsunami otherwise.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
This is not collaboration
Their purpose is to make information freely available, and if they have limitations imposed upon them by the local government, it is certainly better than nothing at all! And it may give them enough of a taste that they demand full internet freedom and overthrow those oppressive government restrictions.
And do you really think that China's government would give a damn if Google refused to do business there? Why would they care?
Pro vs con, Google should absolutely do business in China.
Companies such as Boeing that build weapons should not. Lumping them in the same category is foolish.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Thailand censors wildlife
[ link to this | view in chronology ]