| Oregon Magazine |
| The Real Cost of Google's Sell-out to China
By Thomas Lipscomb Google is perfectly willing to posture as a brave defender of the
privacy of its users in the U.S. marketplace it already dominates while
caving to the immense commercial opportunity awaiting it in China. This
is a
(Written January 26, 2006) -- Last week Google announced its intention to resist a Department of Justice court action underway. DOJ wanted Google to allow a surveillance test of millions of its users' search queries as part of its effort to enforce online pornography legislation passed by Congress to protect children. Yahoo, AOL, and MSN had already agreed to cooperate. But now, in an extraordinary development, Google has announced its decision to join the largest internet censorship effort in the world, being run by Communist China. Google will actively assist the Chinese government in barring access
to thousands of web sites and search terms, in fact anything on the world
wide web the Chinese feel might destablize its authoritarian government.
It will also eliminate the blogging and email services it offers
elsewhere in the world
Does Google's concept of "evil" exclude surpressing the free access it currently offers the 100 million Chinese estimated to be on the internet? What's going on here? It is simple enough. Google is talking out of both sides of its mouth. Google is perfectly willing to posture as a brave defender of the privacy of its users in the U.S. marketplace it already dominates while caving to the immense commercial opportunity awaiting it in China. Booming China is already the second largest internet market in the world and soon will pass the largest -- the United States. Google has been badly hampered by the filters placed on access to it by the Chinese government. They slow its search speeds to a crawl, make it undependable, and would keep Google at a competitive commercial disadvantage unless it complied with China's demands. But it now seems more than likely that if some U.S. administration decided to turn Google into a Patriot Act censorship engine or put it under similar restrictions, Google would suddenly find that wasn't "evil" either. It isn't as if Google is in dire straits. The Poynter Institute's analyst
Rick Edmonds pointed out in his review of financial performances at year-end
2005, the market capitalization of "Google itself is valued at more than
$80 billion. After the battering of 2005, newspaper stocks collectively
are down
So today, Google, all by itself, has a larger market capitalization than the entire U.S. newspaper industry. In the past month alone Google's market cap went up to $130.9 billion, twice the newspaper industry. It is now the second largest technology company in the country after Microsoft. 2005 was an annum horribilis in the number of challenges the press has faced in maintaining what it believed were normal exercises of its vital First Amendment freedoms of inquiry. 2006 promises to be worse as the Scooter Libby defense team is expected to subpoena members of the press in far more extensive numbers than led to Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald's indictment. And a promised investigation of the leaks that led to The New York Times's reporting on the Federal Government's secret surveillance of foreign terrorist contacts with individuals inside the United States may be an historic test of both the powers of the executive branch and of the rights of the press under the First Amendment. Google isn't the first Western company to cave to Chinese pressure. But Google is by far the largest and most worrisome case yet. The explosion of internet companies has created a new form of media. While listed as a technology company like IBM or Intel, Google might be more intelligently viewed as a new media company. Thanks to its search technology governments no longer have to censor book by book or publication by publication. They can censor an entire universal library instantly with terrifying efficiency. Google has already announced its intention to create just such a library
with "The Google Library Project" which has been justly criticized for
its "negative option" attack on the basic concept of copyright. Many
are concerned that the concentration of media that has taken place
in the past decade has made the few giant companies that now control them
more vulnerable to
Some years ago, as the Soviet Union was headed for its demise, a Moscow
Book Fair was announced and publishers in the United States and throughout
the world flocked to gain access to a huge potential new market. The Soviets
promised an open market at the Fair to display what publishers felt were
their best books most suited to the market. But as soon as the Fair opened,
Soviet police moved in on publishers and confiscated books they felt might
"feed
Other publishers, fearing this kind of action, had already self-censored
the books they displayed or quickly removed them on the spot. Times Books,
the general book publisher owned by the New York Times Company, immediately
withdrew from the Fair arguing that it was difficult to maintain
First Amendment standards in the United States while conceding them
Perhaps in the 21st century, Google now believes the Wall Street film villain Gordon Gekko was right and "greed is good." It is hard to come up with any other explanation given Google's flexible definition of "evil." But thousands of American and allied troops are dying in Iraq and Afghanistan to bring repressed peoples access to more democratic institutions just as they have died to protect American freedoms in many wars before. Isn't it time Americans and their elected representatives pay more attention to their own cherished freedoms? Aren't the giant keiretsu companies that control American media too willing to suspend them wherever they interfere with their pursuit of profit? Thomas Lipscomb, an Oregon lad who is a frequent contributor to this
Links referenced within this article: letters@editorandpublisher.com
© 2006 Thomas H. Lipscomb, 1360 York Avenue, Suite 3D, New York NY 10021 |