Google Admits China Censorship Was Damaging

pilsner.urquell writes to let us know about a wide-ranging interview with Google's founders from Davos, Switzerland. Larry Page and Sergey Brin admitted that allowing China to censor its search engine did harm to the company in its Western markets. Quoting the Guardian article: "Asked whether he regretted the decision, Mr. Brin admitted yesterday: 'On a business level, that decision to censor... was a net negative.'" The reporter concludes that Google is unlikely to revise its Chinese censorship policy any time soon.

Re:They have nothing to admit or apologize for

[Anonymous Coward]

Image search "oral sex" and you get none of the great images available to westerners, but you do get an iraqi prisoner abuse picture....

Re:This is a positive for Google

[W2k]

It's still there. Just not in the obvious places. Try "tiananmen square student tanks" [google.cn].

The Tiananmen Square protests of 1989, also known as the Tiananmen Square Massacre, June 4th Incident, or the Political Turmoil between Spring and Summer of 1989 by the government of the People's Republic of China, were a series of demonstrations led by students, intellectuals and labour activists in the People's Republic of China between April 15, 1989 and June 4, 1989. The demonstrations centred on Tiananmen Square in Beijing, but large scale protests also occured in cities throughout China, such as in Shanghai.

Re:This is a positive for Google

[koreth]

What's absurd is that Westerners have such a myopic view of China that they can't think of anything but a student protest 17 years ago when they hear the name of one of Beijing's most well-known landmarks. You may not have heard of Tiananmen Square before 1989, but the Chinese had -- the protests took place there in part because the place was already a well-known national symbol to them. Hundreds of thousands of Chinese visit Tiananmen Square every year.

Think St. Peter's Square or the Champs d'Elysee or Trafalgar Square or (to a lesser extent) the National Mall in Washington DC. When you Google "national mall" you don't get a page full of stories about Martin Luther King or Vietnam War protests or the Million Man March, but nobody seems to think that's absurd; when you do that search, chances are you care more about the place itself than about any particular historical event that took place there.

Which isn't to say that it's right for the Chinese government to force search engines to make it harder to dig up stories about that protest. (You might be surprised that a lot of Chinese do know about it, and simply don't consider it the source of outrage we Westerners do, but they should still be able to find out more about it without interference.) But honestly, the results Google returns on its home page are probably what most Chinese people actually want when they enter that search term. It's the English-language Google results for that term that are out of whack in my opinion.

Re:Smells like...

[rtb61]

They sell advertising, your telling me that is of great value and will improve society !!??. How can anybody in a democratic society that supposedly supports freedom and democracy turn around and say it is appropriate to censor freedom and democracy in other countries. I know those people in other countries aren't really human, so as long as you get cheap shit, whether the workers have access to freedom and democracy or are just slave labour does not make a difference.

Google can apologise all it wants to, and waffle to the heavens about how bad it feels about censor words and censor sense, until such time as it stops being the supporter of autocratic anti democratic practices it carries a taint of evil.

Don't forget that Google is censoring Tiananmen Square, the appropriateness of running down peaceful democratic protestors with tanks as well as the continued subjugation of Tibet and even the threatened invasion of the independent country of Taiwan. By supporting the censorship of truth relating to those events it supports those dictatorial principles behind those events, it even has the contempt to believe doing it a profit somehow makes it acceptable.

They never had to refuse the Chinese market, all they had to do was hold out like wikipedia but thirty pieces of silver and cowardice won out.