[ProgSoc] Internet Filter

Roland Turner raz at raz.cx
Thu Jan 14 13:20:52 EST 2010


On 1/14/2010 3:49 AM, jedd wrote:

> On Wednesday 13 January 2010 08:09:24 Roland Turner wrote:
>> On 1/13/2010 12:27 PM, John Elliot wrote:
>>> Is it possible to stop the internet filter?
>> Google. China.
>
>   I wonder if you're referring to the snouts in the trough over
>   the past few years that Microsoft, Cisco, Google et al have
>   been guilty of - or the very recent news that Google's making
>   relatively serious-sounding threats about pulling out entirely?
>
>   Of course, Google has some non-trivial PR issues recently,
>   so it might be a double-win for them, even if it only ends
>   up being serious-sounding threats rather than an actual snout-
>   removal.

I'm guessing that the pro-censorship lobby in Australia is eventually 
going to notice that right beside the links to cunningly-blocked bad 
stuff in Google results there are links to that very same stuff labelled 
"here is the same stuff where your filter can't see it" (in Google-ease, 
this is spelt C-a-c-h-e-d).

At this point, some of the more adventurous will feel the need to 
encourage Google to stop providing Cached links to stuff they don't like 
and set about pressuring Google to please think of the 
profit^H^H^H^H^H^Hchildren. This may, of course, already have happened, 
and may even have been a factor in Google's choices re China ("you're 
doing it for China, you can do it for us...").

In any case, if Google ceases to bow to Chinese pressure to censor, it's 
going to have a serious PR problem with bowing to Australian censorship 
pressure, not to mention the added pressure it will then cop from China 
("you're doing it for Australia...").

I'd hazard a guess that Google has worked out that the problem with 
being in the censorship business has nothing to do with the well-being 
of oppressed Chinese people, and everything to do with staving off 
drooling regulators and lobbyists in every single country in which they 
do business.

- Raz



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