Online giant's retreat puts spotlight on Internet freedoms
What an amazing week. It started with Google on Monday deciding to reroute its Chinese users to its unfiltered Hong Kong-based search engine. But it didn't end there. What Chinese authorities hoped would be a blip that would neatly be resolved instead has ballooned into a much bigger drama. Google's decision - the shot heard 'round the world - threw a spotlight on other online Western companies operating in The People's Republic of China under authorities' tight controls. By Wednesday, GoDaddy stopped registering domain names with Chinese servers and it remains to be seen if other companies follow Google's lead.
Beijing has been quick to react, first accusing Google of acting politically and now blocking search results from its Hong Kong-based search engines. Chinese partners already are backing out of previous deals with Google. The retreat also has offered a peek inside the regime's information control apparatus during times of crisis. Chinese domestic news Web site editors were handed a set of instructions on reporting on the incident, explaining that all content about Google must originate from the central government's main media Web site without any changes, including to the wording of the articles' titles. According to the rules, discussion sessions on any media blogs are forbidden, as is content from any outside or foreign news source.
The events also throw a spotlight on China's draconian restrictions of the Internet and its use of the far-reaching medium to enforce its perpetual prohibition of free speech and the unfettered exchange of ideas.
With about 350 million Chinese people online, China has the most Internet users of any country. But China also maintains the world's most comprehensive online censorship program. Service providers operating in China filter searches, block Web sites, delete objectionable content, and monitor e-mail traffic. Despite pledges for more openness since the Beijing Olympics in 2008, China's controls of online freedom have only become tighter. To access Web sites, such as Radio Free Asia's, China's netizens are forced to use proxy servers and special software to navigate Chinese-restricted cyberspace. Last year, in the weeks leading up to the 20th anniversary of the June 4, 1989, Tiananmen Square crackdown, Google's and Yahoo!'s search engines were filtered and online social networking sites such as Twitter and Facebook were shut down. Since last summer's ethnic unrest in Urumqi, bloggers have described the ongoing cyber blackout of China's Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region as an "Internet prison."
Chinese authorities also go after bloggers when they refuse to walk the party line or post information deemed sensitive. Chinese blogger Huang Qi is serving a prison sentence of three years since being convicted last November for his role in helping the victims' families of the devastating Sichuan earthquake in May 2008. At present, an estimated 73 netizens and bloggers in China are behind bars.
The deep irony is how authorities use the Internet -- with its enormous potential to promote discussion and the free exchange of ideas -- as a means to silence and intimidate. It seems hardly imaginable that the Internet could be used as a tool of suppression. But so successful is China's model that other authoritarian governments strive to emulate it.
Google's move brings attention to this reality. China's incredible growth over the last several decades as a global economic powerhouse has made it easier to overlook its sluggish progress in improving free speech and media freedoms. In refusing to back down, China risks making the very subject of cyberspace a "special topic" that is conspicuously avoided like Tibet and Taiwan.
But who would have known that Google would have led the charge to bring these events about? Least of all, would anyone expect that a commercial company that risks losing out on a vast market would put human rights ahead of profits. That is, until now.
Asma Uddin: Internet Censorship and Machiavellian Restrictions on Religion
Pretty much this. I personally think the US system of allowing racists and homophobes to spout their hateful rhetoric is a horrible interpretation of what it means to have "free speech". Free speech was meant to provide a means for the population to hold constructive discourse concerning the actions of their government without fear of retribution, not to provide a means to freely propagate hatred of their fellow citizens.
But when big, influential corporates begin to value innocence and say “no” it portends interesting times.
Google’s Done Good.
Google has challenged the smug corporate assumption that business alone will liberate.
It will not.
Fellow traveling businesses will allow corrupt, inefficient and doltish coteries, cliques and regimes to bask from the reflected glory of hard won wars for equity, freedom, enlightenment and excellence that have been fought in societies that have produced such new, thoughtful responses.
Fellow traveling businesses, that squander their freedom and slip into cozy relationships with the authorities betray the ” poorest of the poor and the weakest of the weak” in the case of even democracies these are all those without a vote – children, the environment and the future.
Such businesses produce cynicism, and conformism, not innovation and wonder.
Such businesses die slow, inglorious deaths.
Google’s decisions – first to engage and then draw the lakshmanrekha – the line in the sand – are both that will inspire life conscious people.
Mahatma Gandhi was when he took on the might of the empire with stubbed pencils and recycled envelopes.
Erich Fromm characterizes revolutionaries as those imbued with “a passion for independence, a passion for justice, a passion to serve the unfolding of life” . He may have been describing the quintessential Quixote.
This is not to underestimate to quantum of insanity on this planet.
It takes the whole village to create fun alternatives to psychotic behaviour.
In other words, this is not a moment for corporate schadenfreude or voyuerism.
Remember the lessons from Nazi Germany. They first came for the trade unions. Remember apartheid South Africa.
Abuse of power often happens in plain sight, since to the busy and self absorbed lay person, the powerful appear glamorous and formidable and their prey appear to be rebellious, despicable and in many ways, to be asking for it.
Since the past two decades, the Government of India, the Government of my own state, Andhra Pradesh, the Andhra Pradesh High Court , the Chief Information Commissioner and State Information Commissioner have combined to impress on me that what works in India is what I have called the “patronage paradigm” – the paradigm of shoddiness, irresponsibility, cronyism and corruption” – and that ideas of the rule of law and democratic processes are merely spectacles to lull the gullible.
I have been unable to earn a decent living.
The office of the Governor of Andhra Pradesh incited my neighbours to cut off my water supply.
The information commissions in the state and at the centre denied me my right to information on spurious, brazenly illegal grounds and punished me for daring to object.
The high court denied me my right to competent counsel and punished me for complaining.
Even as we speak, Dr Manmohan Singh”s office, “Daredevil” Pratibha Patil’s Rashtrapati Bhavan, Chief Information Commissioner Wajahat Habibullah, State Information Commissioner CD Arha are all locked in a most perverse and ignominious conspiracy of silence to deny me justice.
Even as the Prime Minister’s Office maintains a guilty silence in my case, it appears to have jumped through hoops to heap honour on a businessman alleged to be a serial swindler.
Since close to a year now, I have written to the Commonwealth Human Rights Initiative, Campaign for Judicial Accountability And Reform, Forum For Judicial Accountability, MKSS (Aruna Roy)and Anna Hazare regarding this cascading delinquency of constitutional bodies in India.
There has not been one constructive response.
They all appear to be in helpless denial of the awful truth that an innocent citizen has been hounded and humiliated since two decades, not for any bad behaviour or wrongdoing, but for resisting the dilution of the values of the Indian constitution and standing up for the correct administration of the Right To Information Act 2005.
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Compelling Criminality. Divakar S Natarajan and Varun Gandhi Cannot Both Be Wrong ! 01/28/09
And India’s editorial class will not report the story!
News and views from Divakar S Natarajan’s, “no excuses”, ultra peaceful, non partisan, individual sathyagraha against corruption and for the idea of the rule of law in India.
Now in its 18th year.
Any struggle against a predatory authority is humanity’s struggle to honour the gift of life.
As well as searches for the word "sex" and other "lewd" material.