Japan Follows France In Thinking That Gov't Bureaucracy Can Beat Google

from the how's-that-working-in-France? dept

We've written in the past about the French boondoggle of a plan to create a government-subsidized search engine to compete with Google. Marc Andreessen points out that Japan is the latest country to try to compete with Google using government subsidies. Apparently, a consortium of large Japanese companies will divide up the task of developing a Google-killer, with the whole project overseen by government bureaucrats. Somehow, it's unlikely that Google is worried. One thing that did catch our eye, though, is that as we've discussed before, Japan's overly-restrictive copyright laws seem to be holding back innovation. According to the Financial Times, copyright law doesn't permit companies to hold copies of others' websites on their servers. That makes it awfully hard to build a functional search engine. Perhaps instead of spending money building a government-subsidized search engine, the Japanese government should focus on making its copyright policies more hospitable to high-tech innovation.

Filed Under: bureaucracy, foreign competition, gov't subsidies, search engines
Companies: google, miti