Google under fire

If there's a buck to be made company's will abide by the rules.
 
I think that those who are so quick to vocally criticise Google and other companies doing business in China for their "corporate greed" might want to take a look at how many 'made in China' products they own. Apparently most people don't really mind ongoing human rights violations as long as they get to buy "lots of cheap stuff" (and yes, your motivation is *also* money, i.e. greed, every time you choose to buy a cheaper product from China than a more expensive one from elsewhere). Let's stop the hypocrisy and feigned displays of concern and just admit it, we love buying stuff from China, and we all look the other way while the very money we give them is used to kill and oppress their citizens and censor their media. The world boycotted our products during Apartheid; how many people are making any effort to avoid Chinese products? If you want to do business with China (buying or selling), let Google too. How many of you, if you were exporting a product, would refuse to sell to a Chinese customer if they wanted to purchase your product? I'm not saying it's right, I'm just saying 'let those without sin cast the first stone', because the widespread hypocrisy is sickening ... if you *really* care, put your money where your mouth is.
 
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well put, DavidJ. It is easy to criticise while you live in luxury.
 
DavidJ said:
I think that those who are so quick to vocally criticise Google and other companies doing business in China for their "corporate greed" might want to take a look at how many 'made in China' products they own. Apparently most people don't really mind ongoing human rights violations as long as they get to buy "lots of cheap stuff" (and yes, your motivation is *also* money, i.e. greed, every time you choose to buy a cheaper product from China than a more expensive one from elsewhere). Let's stop the hypocrisy and feigned displays of concern and just admit it, we love buying stuff from China, and we all look the other way while the very money we give them is used to kill and oppress their citizens and censor their media. The world boycotted our products during Apartheid; how many people are making any effort to avoid Chinese products? If you want to do business with China (buying or selling), let Google too. How many of you, if you were exporting a product, would refuse to sell to a Chinese customer if they wanted to purchase your product? I'm not saying it's right, I'm just saying 'let those without sin cast the first stone', because the widespread hypocrisy is sickening ... if you *really* care, put your money where your mouth is.
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Yeah , yeah its one thing to boycott products that were making profits for a bunch of whities who were exploiting the black majority in South Africa. Its another thing entirely to boycott an entire country because of its governments human rights abuses.

And I just had a quick look around the house and couldnt find a thing that was made in China in it.

The issue here is that Google is aiding and abetting the Chinese government in its attempts to censor the information available to its people, for the sake of the profits that would be lost if they didnt.

EDIT: Personally Im not questioning wether or not they should do business in China, I'm questioning the fact that they're willing to compromise their principles in the process.
 
Nick333 said:
And I just had a quick look around the house and couldnt find a thing that was made in China in it.
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You don't wear clothes or shoes then? Your PC components were made where?
 
pimal3 said:
You don't wear clothes or shoes then? Your PC components were made where?
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No I dont wear clothes and shoes :p
Are you implying that I should stop though? Not really my responsibillty to find out were Edgars does their buying now is it?

As for my PC components, probably India and Korea.
 
Nick333 said:
And I just had a quick look around the house and couldnt find a thing that was made in China in it.
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Maybe you're an exception; I suspect most people would be hard-pressed to go one day without touching or using something made in China. A quick survey of my home reveals: my mouse, keyboard, monitor, computer speakers, 'Skype' headset, ADSL router, HP printer, telephone, parts of my cellphone, my cellphone battery, clothes, parts of my laptop, lightbulbs, a lamp, sugar bowl, toaster, some stationary, multi-plug and AC/DC power adapters, cutlery, even a children's book I recently bought for my nephew.

Apart from race I'm not sure I see the difference with South Africa, it's still basically a minority of people oppressing the majority (and we're funding them with trade deficits to keep inflation low). Sure one might argue that the SA boycotts did more harm in the short-term to the very people they were supposed to help - but maybe not in the long term, as our isolated and declining economy did help weaken the old government and added to the grassroots resentment that was feeding the struggle, albeit not terribly much.

Any way you look at it, a percentage of the income from every Chinese product we buy funds oppression (but OTOH feeds some Chinese person :/). Should we do nothing though? Or should we expect big companies to enforce morality (while we pressure companies like Edgars to give us stuff as cheaply as possible)? Could Google influence Chinese policy anyway? I'm not convinced, given that their competitors (e.g. Microsoft and Yahoo) are already in China anyway (for which I don't recall similar uproars; likewise for Cisco, who do even worse things there) ... the market would literally 'punish' Google if they stayed out and reward the "evil" companies that stayed in (cf. Coke vs. Pepsi in SA ... Google could "take a stand", but 1.3 billion Chinese people would simply use e.g. www.yahoo.cn instead). I think it maybe should be our responsibility to know about and boycott "bad" suppliers for the products we buy. It seems very convenient somehow to say (for example) "well these shoes I'm buying from Edgars were made with child labour, but that's not my responsibility". It's a bit like people who buy 'hot' goods and justify it to themselves by saying "well I didn't steal it, and how was I to know" when they of course knew. We can't plead ignorance.

Actually, I don't really know what the answer is. Maybe we really are powerless to change things, I don't know.

[Hmm ... on second thoughts, my 'child labour shoes' example is not a good one, as in that case the merchant is both the supplier of the product and the "perpetrator" of the human rights violation; for the average 'made in China' product the "perpetrator" is the government and the merchant is usually just some Joe Citizen (notwithstanding the relatively centrally planned nature of the Chinese economy).]
 
Well. not buying Chinese stuff wouldn't do much, it woudl just turn into a big old Zimbabwe or something. You dont see North Korea folding or becoming freer after so many decades...

The internet is a different story though, the chinese people should be able to read about democrazy and a free tibet so they can see what nonsense their government is pulling, like we here at myADSL can see what our monke... er ministers are up too.
 
supersunbird said:
Well. not buying Chinese stuff wouldn't do much, it woudl just turn into a big old Zimbabwe or something.
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Yup :/ I tend to agree with you there. But likewise I think Google staying out of China wouldn't do much either - especially not as others like Yahoo are already there.

The internet is a different story though, the chinese people should be able to read about democrazy and a free tibet so they can see what nonsense their government is pulling
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Yes, they should. But then shouldn't we direct our criticism at companies like Cisco, who actually build and sell the "weapons" i.e. tools used for censorship. Google are not 'gatekeepers' of information - they can't "block" sites and can't prevent anyone from accessing or even finding websites about democracy or Tibet. Omitting a site from Google's search results doesn't 'take that site down', so you can still type the address into the browser bar, or tell your friends about it, or advertise it in the newspaper or spraypaint the URL on walls. It also doesn't prevent linking to it from any of the several billion other webpages on the Internet. Only the Chinese government can actually *block* sites (and for that they apparently use Cisco's stuff, Google doesn't even have a part in that infrastructure AFAIK).
 
I think, perhaps, the reason people are taking this issue to heart is that we expect more from Google. They're supposed to be the good guys.
 
Well, what's better, no search engine or a censored one. Google can hardly break the law, they'd get shut down in China or blocked completely. Should they have left China Google-less?
 
In any case, it seems (although I'm not sure, and it's hard to confirm from here) as though the sites omitted from the results are those sites that you already can't view from within China anyway - which is 100% done by the government. Is there much point in linking to sites that effectively don't exist? Apart from linking to sites, the only thing left that Google provides is the two or three line "snippets" that Google effectively "republishes", but is it Google's responsibility to illegally re-publish banned information or publish lists of which URLs are banned? They're not a political activism organisation, and as convenient as it might seem for us to say "Google please be one it would make me feel better about doing nothing", I'm not sure we should expect that. (If I visit China, merely failing to actively protest human rights violations and break unfair laws while there doesn't make me "evil"; I'm not mandated to become an activist just out of being there.)

Interestingly it looks like Yahoo (also in China) appears to 'censor' even worse ... consider the following searches for 'tiananmen square':

www.google.com: 2,380,000 results
www.google.cn: 13,700 results
www.yahoo.com: 1,830,000 results
www.yahoo.cn: 4 (!) results

For interest, there are dynamic proxies that allow full access to the entire web from within China, although probably not used widely.
 
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