Censorship in China: Cost of Doing Business?
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Google's creation of a local, censored website in China caused quite an uproar. But it was the last major U.S.-based search engine to do so, after MSN and Yahoo!. Did it really deserve the criticism it received? Is compromising principles simply a cost of doing business? Or is the situation far more complicated than it looks?
Google came in for some serious castigation recently when it launched a version of its search and news websites in China. These new sites featured an important difference: censorship. Specifically, Google bowed to the laws of the Chinese government, and censored material the authorities deemed objectionable.
If you’re a subscriber to our SEO Chat newsletter, you’ve already read about some of this. But you might not have heard about the ongoing uproar over the situation. In a way, it seems a little surprising, since Google is the last search engine to create a version of itself in tune with China’s laws. Yahoo! and MSN did it first. But there was relatively little complaining at that time, possibly for two reasons. First, there were other major search engines based in the U.S. (where free speech is supposedly sacred) that didn’t censor their content, and that Chinese web surfers could try to use. Second, Yahoo! and MSN don’t have the phrase “Don’t be evil” as part of their corporate culture.
Reporters Without Borders condemned Google; so did Congressional representative Chris Smith (R-NJ), in very strong terms. Everyone seems to think that Google and the other companies have “sold out” their moral principles in order to make a quick buck. Some even include Cisco in that corporate gang of shame because China uses Cisco routers to filter the information its citizens can access through the Internet.
As often happens in these cases, though, there’s a lot more going on beneath the surface. Few things are ever black and white; how can a company do the right thing when it’s frequently hard to tell what the right thing actually is? On what do you base your standard of what is “right” when you’re a business with a literally global reach – and there is no worldwide consensus? These questions are worth keeping in mind as we look at the story so far.
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