This article first appeared on the San Jose edition of Examiner.com on March 24, 2010 at this direct link
Right balance? Google, China & the unraveling aftermath
Bonnie Boglioli Randall
Examiner San Jose Web 2.0 columnist
The past 72 hours has seen heightened nerves in the aftermath of Google's decision to reroute its Chinese servers off the mainland to Hong Kong, where they are safe from PRC censorship. Amidst rumors and speculation on both sides of the Pacific, there was also news this morning of an apparent hack on Google's Chinese site.
The latest unfolding event concerns Tianya, a Chinese IT company which partnered with Google in 2007 to provide widely popular community forums. It announced moments ago that it will sever most ties with the Silicon Valley company in light of the move to Hong Kong. Initial reports out of Beijing are that Tianya has taken full control of its social networking sites and plans on continuing their servicessans Google.
"There were many fields we were planning to cooperate on, such as online video, and though we just got a license to provide online video, Google has left. So we will run the video business by ourselves,"said Tianya CEO Xing Ming.
With Google effectively out of the picture, the Chinese search giant Baidu is once again sitting pretty, which has seen a 54% growth of its shares on NASDAQ since Google's announcement that it would end censoring in January. Microsoft's Bing, which has a very small segment and has been the target of many pleas to refuse to censor à la Google, has remained defiant to such calls to action.
Despite these news stories, many have applauded the Monday move to Hong Kong as a reclaiming of Google's "don't be evil" mantra. Google's 2006 entry into the enormous Chinese IT market, with its subsequent censoring, drew sharp criticism from some Internet and human rights groups. The company believed that some information (indeed a vast amount of new information) was better than none for Chinese users.
"Censoring information is destructive in that it gives users the appearance of complete access where in fact the access has been limited. That harm should be weighed against the benefit of providing information that otherwise wouldn’t have been available at all to Chinese users." says Larry Downes, author of the new book Laws of Disruption and fellow at Stanford Law School's Center for Internet and Society.
"That the government became more rather than less concerned about Google over time might imply that Google had gotten the balance right—that is, that the Chinese government was increasingly aware that even what it originally thought of as benign information could have the kind of transformative effects it wanted to avoid."
Increased awareness of cyber attacks and censorship has played out in diplomatic arena's, as reported yesterday. The saga, for now, continues. We can expect more such headlines in the days and weeks ahead.
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