Google CEO responds to China setback
Posted on June 29, 2009
Filed Under online marketing | 1 Comment
The Google chief executive, Eric Schmidt, has said the company had resolved its differences with the Chinese Government and agreed to take down contentious content from its search engine in China.
Speaking to Media at the Cannes International Advertising Festival, Schmidt confirmed google.cn was back online. “Officially, what I can say is: we will continue to meet with the Government to address their concerns, and we wish to communicate directly with them in regard to our services and progress in addressing this problem.”
China’s crackdown on Google is the latest move in its recent efforts to crackdown on pornography. Earlier in June, the government issued a directive requiring the installation of Green Dam Youth Escort software on Chinese computers as of 1 July.
The software aims to protect youth from pornography and other inappropriate materials.
However, the Chinese Government has come under intense criticism both inside and outside China. Critics argue that the software will enable the government to increase its censorship of content accessible to the more than 300 million Chinese people who currently use the internet.
Schmidt said that it was at their “peril” that governments attempted to impose blackouts on media such as TV, internet, radio and mobile phones.
He added that the search giant, which owns video-sharing website YouTube, consistently tried to explain to regimes that restrict communication that, ultimately, attempts to isolate a population fail.
“We have lots of lawyers, lawyers in every one of these countries,” Schmidt said. “We explain if they do this [block freedom of speech and communication] what will happen. Sometimes they moderate their behaviour and sometimes not. If they don’t listen to us it is at their peril.”
Schmidt expanded on this point: “By ‘peril’ I mean it is what the citizens will do, citizens can no longer be restricted by the kind of strategies evil dictatorships [use]… you can’t keep people in the dark.”
Schmidt said he hoped that the many clips of violent protest scenes in Iran, for example, posted on YouTube – in many cases the only footage available following reporting bans for international media – had helped to “moderate an over-reaction by the government”.
“The internet is the strongest force for individual self-expression ever invented,” Schmidt said.
“Governments around the world, even democratically elected, have difficulty with [the flow of] information online. Dictatorships and closed communities one after the other will try and shut down communication from inside. Strategies governments use trying to shut down people’s speech are terrible strategies and will not succeed,” he added.
Source: http://www.brandrepublic.asia
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Stefan is Managing Director of 3digitalminds Co., Ltd., a China Internet marketing agency and SEO company. He shares thoughts and experiences about online marketing in China, China SEO and Chinese PPC.Contact
In my mind he is right by saying “The internet is the strongest force for individual self-expression ever invented,” but what about that it was at their “peril” that governments attempted to impose blackouts on media such as TV, internet, radio and mobile phones?! I would say Google, among other companies, has set up structures to support government censorship. As Carol Bartz, CEO of Yahoo notes, “It is not our job to fix the Chinese government.” I agree. But it is sort of spectacularly, willfully oblique to simultaneously condemn the Chinese government, support government censorship, deny responsibility for censorship, and most spectacularly, in Google’s’s case, criticize the efficacy of government-imposed censorship.
That internet censorship cannot be complete, and that such strategies are “terrible” and doomed, does not alleviate the complicity of companies and governments trying to tamp down free expression. Certainly governments, but also to a very large extent Google and other internet platforms, bear responsibility for not only maintaining the internet as a space for uncensored expression, but upholding principles of net neutrality, access, and free expression in the face of censorious individuals, movements, organizations, and regimes.
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