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thatcrazycajunFirst Microsoft, then Yahoo! and now Google have decided it is better to kowtow to the demands of the Communist Chinese government (CCG) for censorship of what its citizens are allowed to see on the Internet (and collect billions of yuan from them in the process) than to show some fucking backbone and refuse to do business in China under the government's restrictive terms. Two of Google's publicly-posted 10 philosophical tenets read, "You can make money without doing evil" and "The need for information crosses all borders." Google is now openly violating both of these tenets (albeit not without agonizing over the decision, its staff says). Aiding and abetting governmental silencing of dissent is evil, period. Paragraph.
Is it truly better for freedom-starved Chinese to have access to some information than none at all? Is it better to engage the Commies or isolate them? The latter strategy has failed miserably as applied to Cuba's Red regime; but is it not just barely possible, even though supposedly the CCG has all the leverage with its huge population of potential customers, that these three free-market behemoths might have been able to shove (or at least nudge) the CCG toward a less repressive policy with their own not-inconsiderable leverage? After all, the CCG wants Western products and investment at least as badly as Western companies want Chinese money. I say it's time to put pressure on the titans of the Internet to start putting pressure on the People's Republic to take down "the great firewall of China." Hey, it worked on the Berlin Wall...
Is it truly better for freedom-starved Chinese to have access to some information than none at all? Is it better to engage the Commies or isolate them? The latter strategy has failed miserably as applied to Cuba's Red regime; but is it not just barely possible, even though supposedly the CCG has all the leverage with its huge population of potential customers, that these three free-market behemoths might have been able to shove (or at least nudge) the CCG toward a less repressive policy with their own not-inconsiderable leverage? After all, the CCG wants Western products and investment at least as badly as Western companies want Chinese money. I say it's time to put pressure on the titans of the Internet to start putting pressure on the People's Republic to take down "the great firewall of China." Hey, it worked on the Berlin Wall...
