This blog and others have had plenty of criticism lately of internet titans Microsoft, Yahoo and Google enabling the totalitarian impulses of the Chinese regime. Some of this criticism may have gotten through. Google, at least, is hearing the message and resisting the autocrats in Beijing. From science-oriented Physorg.com:
Mainland media control over Chinese-language content took a blow Wednesday with state press claiming rage after Mountain View, Calif.-based Internet giant Google removed referrals to Taiwan as a province.
Chinese media reports said “Google.com, world’s largest Internet search engine, deleted the words ‘Taiwan, a province of the People’s Republic of China’ on a map of Taiwan linked to its maps search engine maps.google.com. This has drawn rage from Chinese officials and the people.”
The people? Which people, exactly? No one is saying. Meanwhile, from our friends at Xinhua:
Google made the changes “under pressure of extremists in Taiwan’s pan-Green camp (a pro-independence alliance between the ruling Democratic Progressive Party and the hard-line Taiwan Solidarity Union party),” Xinhua reported.
But, as the Maoists say, two steps forward, one step backwards. Don’t expect Google to exactly lead the charge on the democracy front.
Company spokeswoman Debbie Frost claims the changes were just a “regular update” of all of the site’s map pages, not a deliberate effort targeting the Taiwan page.
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4 Comments
1. Stephen_M:Agreed. Like: If there actually is a Palestine then what’s all the fussin’ been about?
Oct 19, 2005 - 6:10 pm 2. thibaud:Notwithstanding all their new age nonsense, Google is a for-profit corporation, period. They create software, they offer a service based on that software, and receive advertising and license revenues from their customers. Fundamentally, they’re no different from Ford Motor Corporation, which was happy to do business with Stalin in 1929, even as Stalin was systemically slaughtering by starvation millions of farmers in Ukraine and western Russia.
In Henry Ford’s words : “No matter where industry prospers, whether in India, China or Russia, all the world is bound to catch some good from it,” NYT, May 31, 1929. It’s not clear whether this sentiment underlay the old man’shis notorious hatred of jews and unions, but you can call him an idealist, of a sort.
Now, change “industry” to “software” in the above statement, and you have the Brin-Page-Gates-Yang ideology, which is that what’s good for the growth of software giants is ipso facto good for the world. Which may, over the long term, be true in China. Certainly, on balance Google and Yahoo and MSFT are more a greater force for liberation than repression in China.
But let’s not pretend that their motivation is to spread democracy. If they can make money by enhancing personal space and autonomy with their products, then they will make money that way. If they can make money by enhancing the power and repressive control mechanisms of the state, then I have little doubt that they will seek to make money that way, too.
Oct 19, 2005 - 10:10 pm 3. Robin Munn:Company spokeswoman Debbie Frost claims the changes were just a “regular update” of all of the site’s map pages, not a deliberate effort targeting the Taiwan page.
Heh. That’s nice and disingenuous of her. The “regular update” she’s talking about was the one that pushed all the changes from the backend, test servers onto the frontend, production servers. That sort of thing happens regularly, and will pick up *all* changes made on the backend, no matter what they are. So her statement is true insofar as the change to the publicly-visible part of Google Maps goes.
The change to the backend data, however, had to have been specific and deliberate.
Note: I have no special knowledge of how Google’s computer setup works, and the above is merely speculation on my part. (Although it’s informed speculation — I work in the computer industry, although not for Google, and I have a pretty good idea of how these things are usually set up). Still, I’d be willing to bet at 20:1 odds that I’m right.
Oct 20, 2005 - 7:36 am 4. ahem:This raises an interesting question in my mind: mammoth software companies as entities with political influence. Where is it going to lead? I’m not entirely sure the effect will be a good one.
Oct 20, 2005 - 9:10 am