So the blog is basically dead. We have not written anything worth posting in a while, I tend to start posts and then mid way through decide they are dumb, however there is some recent tech news that I wanted to put my 2 cents in before it becomes “olds” (is that the opposite or news?) What I am talking about is the giant balls that Google has in their stance towards China.
In case you missed it on every other tech related nerd blog on the internet Google recently told China that they were no longer going to filter their search results for google.cn (which is China Google). Basically China does not want their people to get to choose what parts of the internet they see, particularly if those parts of the internet are critical of China or discuss aspects of Chinese history that the government finds unsavory.
Google like most international companies had been playing ball with the Chinese government, because well, China is a massive consumer base and companies are willing to over look China's human rights and censorship foibles (tongue in cheek) in order to do business. Google makes up about 30% of the Chinese search market, while Baidu, the search engine run by the Chinese government makes up majority of search.
Basically I want to give kudos to Google for basically giving the Chinese government the good old America finger and without warning removing the filtering from their search. Google is willing to negotiate with the Chinese government to see if they can reach a compromise, but if not Google is also willing to shut down Google.cn and all their other business there, which would cut Google off from a huge amount of consumers and potentially a crap load of money. You are welcome to read Google’s blog post about this, and read all their reasons for doing this, its kinda a hodgepodge of reasons all of the good but I personally don’t think they are the “real” reasons Google has taken up this stance, I honestly think that this goes back to Google’s original manta of “Be Good” and they have some ill feelings towards China.
While I have no idea what China will do, they may just tell Google to go screw, but at the same time they might end up making a compromise with the search giant. If China and Google come to compromise that means that Google does not need to filter their searching then Google has basically threatened the a country with trade sanctions and won, and they did it without an army or any threat of force. There is no Google Army (though if there was I would not screw with them, tazer Nexus 1 anybody)
Good job Google you have balls, and are striking points for the good guys. If Google is successful here, I hope it will open the door to using business power and money as both the stick and the carrot to get other countries to behave. So America, we like to say that we are the most powerful country, the richest country (not sure if we can make that claim at all of late) and most influential country in the world, so why is it that we always use our military? No one dies if Google is successful and no one dies if they fail. I mean yeah I guess the stakes are pretty high for a country, it would look bad for America to make a threat and have our bluff called, it would make us look ineffective, but doesn’t it also make us look ineffective and weak to be fighting 2 wars in places that are a stone throw away from being in the stone age, against a foe that we really can’t win against?
Ok enough before I go on a political rant and get away from this nice little post about Google and their giants balls.
No comments:
Post a Comment