{"id":547878,"date":"2006-01-31T07:18:34","date_gmt":"2006-01-31T07:18:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/localhost:8888\/wordpress\/technology\/547878-internet-gods-risk-their-own-freedom.html"},"modified":"2006-01-31T07:18:34","modified_gmt":"2006-01-31T07:18:34","slug":"internet-gods-risk-their-own-freedom","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/technology\/547878-internet-gods-risk-their-own-freedom.html","title":{"rendered":"Internet gods risk their own freedom"},"content":{"rendered":"

Normally, figures such as Bill Gates of Microsoft and Sergey Brin and Larry Page of Google are as proud as other software engineers. But what happens when business interests clash with ethics? That is occurring in China not only to Google, but to Microsoft and Yahoo, and it ought to make Silicon Valley\u2019s finest worried. <\/font><\/p>\n

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As Gates said, the internet is a porous and democratic medium. China\u2019s censors may struggle to eliminate all references to the Tiananmen Square demonstrations and block dissident bloggers, but it is a Sisyphean task. Closing television stations and snipping articles out of newspapers requires a lot less effort than scanning the internet for every politically incorrect click. <\/font><\/p>\n

Internet companies cannot simply shrug off their opportunism in China. Other foreign companies may implicitly provide support to a repressive regime by being there, but there are a couple of reasons why the internet giants should be held to higher standards than the rest. <\/font><\/p>\n

The first is the internet industry is regulated far more lightly than many others. The internet is treated as an open space for the public, a creative commons not subject to the restrictions that bind other areas of communications. Any suggestion that this virtual Eden should be trespassed upon provokes protests from its advocates. <\/font><\/p>\n

Internet companies enjoy unique privileges, and could easily find them taken away if their reputations deteriorate. <\/font><\/p>\n

This leads to the second reason for internet giants to beware. As Gates said, the internet acts for most of us as an instrument of liberation. Through search engines such as Google, it also allows us to find and peruse a huge amount of information. We can search for documents, find photos and videos not merely of the well known but of millions of others, and even see satellite photographs of our houses. <\/font><\/p>\n

That is a double-edged sword. A search engine is great if you are the searcher, but what about when a government searches for you? That happened to Shi Tao, a dissident Chinese journalist sentenced to 10 years in prison last year for \u201crevealing state secrets\u201d after Yahoo submitted to the government\u2019s demand to know who was using a Yahoo e-mail address. <\/font><\/p>\n

Most people who use the internet think little of the fact that they send out a stream of personal information. Google makes money by identifying the advertisements that might attract people through the things they search for. Yahoo knows a vast amount about users of My Yahoo accounts. <\/font><\/p>\n

All of this data is out there, waiting for governments to demand it. Police forces and governments often subpoena internet data in criminal investigations. <\/font><\/p>\n

It is true that internet companies hold less personal data than banks and credit card companies. But the financial services industry is already tightly regulated, unlike the internet. Microsoft\u2019s fear that internet firms could get caught up in the equivalent of the scandal that led to the SarbanesOxley act is one reason why it has drafted its own internet data privacy law in the US. <\/font><\/p>\n

The internet giants ought to tread carefully. The benefits of an open internet, free from clumsy regulation and inquisitive authorities, have been huge. But they need not last, and will be curtailed if the public loses faith in Google and others. China is a vast market, but what does it profit an internet company if it gains the whole world and loses its soul? <\/font><\/p>\n

Inet-Bridge ||<\/em>\u00a0 <\/font>Discuss this article<\/font><\/a> <\/font><\/p>\n

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<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

SILICON Valley came to the mountains of Switzerland at Davos last week. Was it my imagination or did its leaders look shamefaced?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":23,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_sma_x_autopost_status":"idle","_sma_x_autopost_error":"","_sma_x_post_id":"","_sma_facebook_post_id":"","_sma_instagram_post_id":"","_sma_threads_post_id":"","_sma_x_attempts":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[17],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-547878","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/547878"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/23"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=547878"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/547878\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=547878"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=547878"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=547878"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}