Monday 20 February, 2006

Googling blog world

A slightly shorter (possibly tighter) version of this column was in the Age this weekend:

Last month Antony Loewenstein quoted an article from Asia Weekly which stated that there are three types of bloggers in China: 'angry youth, petty bourgeois and commercial bloggers'. Well, they'll certainly be angrier in the wake of Google's January 25 announcement that they are prepared to allow the Chinese government to filter the results of Google China - now many bloggers are finding it illegal to enter their own site. Students for a Free Tibet responded to Google's move by orchestrating protests around the globe, and since Valentine's Day 4145 people have gone to the NoLuv4Google.com site and pledged to 'Break up with Google'. Becky Hogge of OpenDemocracy asks what deal Google did with the Chinese government to get the one concession they did achieve: that google.cn tells its customers when their search results have been filtered. 'What happens when a ubiquitous search engine that stores data from millions of user searches a day opens a service inside a totalitarian regime with a thirst to know what every one of its citizens is doing at all times? . . how much data are you logging about your new Chinese customers, Google? And what will you do when the Chinese authorities ask you to hand it over?' Boing Boing points out that Yahoo! have, 'provided Chinese authorities with personally identifying data on . . . a journalist using what they believed to be an anonymous Yahoo account.' Tibet will be Free reported that this week the US Congress rebuked Google, as well as Yahoo!, Microsoft, and Cisco for their partnerships with the Chinese government and quoted Democratic Congressman Tom Lantos' statement that:'captains of industry should have been developing new technologies to bypass the sickening censorship of government and repugnant barriers to the Internet. Instead, they enthusiastically volunteered for the Chinese censorship brigade.' Apparently, 'Lantos' strong words were met by equally critical remarks from his colleague across the aisle, Republican Chris Smith.'

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