Google Verse China Cyberwar Controversy: The Great Google Coverup? or is it a game-changer to enact Bill Online Global Freedom Act sponsored by US Congress? Jay Ogilvy on Google VS China This move de-legitimates the current Chinese regime. It shows the limits of Chinese Communism when confronted by a different architecture of communication. It demonstrates the incompatibility between authoritarian control and the kind of open, peer-to-peer network so necessary to economic success in the information era. http://bit.ly/5SdGR4 Newyorker Evan Osnos and Ken Auletta on Google’s defiance of Chinese censorship.
http://ow.ly/WUYS Douglas Rushkoff: My fear—for Google and for us—is that the reason they know it’s the Chinese government behind these attacks is because Google gave them the key. http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2010-01-13/the-great-google-coverup/full/
http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5jGG7fsuWucgiKLgcsR9hek0uJ7Sw
“Google sent a thrill of encouragement through the hearts of millions of Chinese,” Representative Chris Smith, the bill’s chief sponsor, told a news conference. “It is a game-changer.”“But IT companies are not powerful enough to stand up to a repressive government like China. Without US government support, they are inevitably forced to be ever more complicit in the repressive governments’ censorship and surveillance,” said Smith, a Republican from New Jersey.
Under the bill, called the Global Online Freedom Act, the US government wold list nations that restrict the Internet and prohibit US companies from storing personally identifiable information in those countries.
http://www.thebigmoney.com/blogs/feeling-lucky/2010/01/14/google-vs-china-day-three
In wsj Jessica Vascellaro reports that Larry Page, Sergey Brin, and Eric Schmidt debated how to respond to the hacks for weeks. As you might expect, Schmidt was the most cautious of the three, arguing that over the long term, Google’s role in sharing information would go a long way toward liberalizing the country. But Brin would have none of it in the end. His childhood in Russia left him particularly antagonistic toward authoritarian governments, and Brin had long been confiding to friends that cooperating with censorship left him feeling guilty and sick. He put his foot down.
http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2010/01/google_lawyer_we_operate_a_glo.html
Listen NPR in All Things Considered’s Melissa Block asked Google chief legal officer David Drummond who wrote in his blog Google statement to quit China if that means the search engine giant is gone for good from China. He said no. “We operate a global website and that website is accessible in China. … You can rest assured that we will do everything we can to serve the Chinese market,” he said. “We do intend to continue to serve the Chinese people (and) China, which is one of the world’s great nations.” But Melissa Fanning predicted Google move out of China Silicon Dragon: Why Google is Quitting China Now
http://www.silicondragon.blogspot.com/
It’s easy to give up if you’ve already lost the battle. And Google is doing just that in China.
Eric Schmidt’s move to quit offering a censored Google.cn search engine to the Chinese market has been read by idealists as the right thing to do. But it’s a business decision.
