China Hits Back At Google 432
sopssa writes "After Google yesterday started redirecting google.cn users to their uncensored Hong Kong-based google.com.hk servers, the Chinese government has now hit back at Google by restricting access to Google's Hong Kong servers. 'On Tuesday mainland China users could not see uncensored Hong Kong-based content after the government either disabled certain searches or blocked links to results.' China Mobile, the largest wireless carrier in the country, has also been approached by the Chinese government to cancel a contract with Google about having google.cn on their mobile home page for search. China Unicom, the second largest carrier in China, has also either postponed or killed the launch of Android-based mobile phones in the country."
Ping Pong (Score:5, Insightful)
This will end when Google is completely blocked (or 'filtered') by China. I really don't see any other outcome. China will never budge on these issues (at least not in my lifetime) and Google has already burned some of its bridges to China.
And let the war begin (Score:5, Insightful)
Google needs to pull out. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:OMG (Score:5, Insightful)
OK, here are your standard template responses:
Google, leave China alone... (Score:2, Insightful)
They obviously know what's best for their people, and you're just interfering. (sarcasm) Just let it go, pull completely out of the market, and call it a day. Besides, the longer this lingers on, the more Chinese black hats are gonna slam your servers.
Just "concede" defeat (and Chinese ass-hattery) and call it a day.
Re:Google needs to pull out. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:And let the war begin (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:And let the war begin (Score:5, Insightful)
I remember when reading cyberpunk novels felt like escapism.
:T
Re:Google needs to pull out. (Score:5, Insightful)
Capitalists, as a class, aren't particularly known for being supporters of workers rights, free speech, or a fair marketplace. In fact, they are the class against whom advocates of workers rights are usually struggling, the class that seeks to suppress negative comments on their products through the legal system, and a class that seeks to lobby government to protect their own interests by creating barriers to entry to the markets in which they have established themselves.
I'm not saying those things are true of Google's owners, in particular, but certainly the idea that capitalists wouldn't deal with people for the reasons you describe is, well, hard to reconcile with most of the history of capitalists.
Re:Ping Pong (Score:3, Insightful)
This should have been the way its done all along!
If the Chinese government wants to filter the internet, the onus should be on the Government, not the corporations. They've already built their great firewall - why is that not working fine enough?
Seriously, Google has to alter the way it serves up web pages? Thats like re-programming the entire application! Why not have China Filter everything that goes out and comes in, and if its not to their liking - its their own problem? And if Google doesn't like it - then they shouldn't be there.
Don't Forget Our Pollution Exports (Score:5, Insightful)
But hey, when the labor is cheap and can do almost the same as our expensive labor, who cares?!? North American citizens? Mmmmmmmm wait a minute.... nope, the WalMart parking lot is still full....
You forgot about the icing on the cake: they don't care about their environment! Since their officials are all corrupt, it's just a matter of greasing some of the bureaucratic wheels and those heavy metals in the drinking water aren't a problem! Not only are we exporting unskilled labor, we're exporting our pollution!
*cough*
What's that you say? Their people are suffering? China uses the same planet we do? We'll eventually suffer from each other's pollution? I liked it better when my point of view was limited to my immediate surrounding area where I can find a coffee maker for $12 at Walmart.
Re:Ping Pong (Score:1, Insightful)
Yup, I guess so.
Re:Google's war with China (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Google needs to pull out. (Score:3, Insightful)
They don't value workers rights, free speech, or even a fair marketplace.
Yeah, but which one are you talking about, the communists or the capitalists?
Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Google needs to pull out. (Score:4, Insightful)
I should have phrased it as "How can a free nation decide to do business with a totalitarian country.
Re:Chinese Gov Doesn't Get It. (Score:5, Insightful)
Of course they understand it. The purpose of the Great Firewall, like the Australian filtering, is to cause sufficient inconvenience and paranoia in the average user that they simply knuckle under. The map for this sort of thing is from Orwell's 1984. What counts is that you're never sure you're being watched, so you must always assume you are. That is how the Chinese government and that gang of liberty-haters in Rudd's government in Australia operate. Make it difficult enough and make it sound much more technically imposing and encompassing than it really is, then who cares about the 1-5% of computer users with the technical knowledge to circumvent the filters. They still basically have to keep it quiet lest the thought police come along and knock on their door.
This is what you get when you have a government that is stark raving terrified of its citizens. All nations should beware of politicians who show those classic signs of fear and loathing of freedom. Most politicians and bureaucrats are precisely of that nature, because the freer the citizen is, the more contained their own power is.
Re:Google needs to pull out. (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Google needs to pull out. (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm not sure how in the hell capitalists here in the U.S. decided we could do fair business with a totalitarian communist nation.
They don't value workers rights, free speech, or even a fair marketplace.
And neither do the capitalists here in the States.
Whoops! (Score:3, Insightful)
You made the assumption that the US government would allow such a move. We have several client states that would revolt if we provided democratizing influences like free access to information. These states include: Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Syria, Egypt, Jordan, Turkey...
The US Government would now allow such a move against China either, since they are our most lucrative trading partner, and damn close to becoming more than that. Money matters to us a hell of a lot more than freedom.
Re:Google needs to pull out. (Score:3, Insightful)
Who cares about fair? As long as US businesses can do profitable business with a totalitarian communist nation then they will.
Re:Google needs to pull out. (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Google needs to pull out. (Score:5, Insightful)
They don't value workers rights, free speech, or even a fair marketplace.
Nah, the real problem is that the Chinese government keeps changing the rules. Every business there is doing something illegal, due to the complexity and arbitrariness of the Chinese regulatory environment. That means any time the government wants to, it can squeeze them or drive them out of China. On top of that, some government agency can just make up rules on the spot and crush a business on that basis alone. And you can't count on the bureaucrats to stay bought. Well, maybe local Chinese businesses can, but not the foreign ones that are getting shafted here.
Business thrives in a world where the rules are constant. Either government is fair and consistent or when it's bought, it stays bought. Uncertainty like this kills the ability of business to predict what it should do in the future. Even if you don't get mugged by the Chinese government, you still need to take them into account.
Re:U.S. Dollars (Score:4, Insightful)
The one reason the Chinese government could care is that it is extremely sensitive to foreign criticism. Look at how it reacted to criticism of the Beijing Olympics or, heck, even at a stupid film festival in Melbourne that nobody had ever heard of before because it showed a documentary on the ethnic Uighurs in China, to the point where the Chinese government even authorized hacking of this speck-on-the-wall festival's website (I'm sure the organized were thrilled by the Streisand Effect). It's precisely this that Google is likely hoping forces China to loosen restrictions. Of course, Google has probably miscalculated to some degree. As much as China hates foreign criticism, it acts all the worse at internal criticism.
Re:Chinese Gov Doesn't Get It. (Score:5, Insightful)
First of all, I'm not an American. Second, I never said Western governments are pure and good (I mean, I did directly name the Australian government). But I can tell you this, you can type "George Bush waterboarding Guantanamo" in Google in the United States, and get some pretty damning pages up right off the top. Try typing "Tienanmen massacre" in China and see what you get up.
It's night and day, no matter how much you pathetic Chinese government apologists try to assert differently.
Re:Ping Pong (Score:5, Insightful)
And that, in short, is why clever governments tend to try to shift much of the implementation work on to the corporations. China may be ostensibly communist; but they aren't morons, and they follow this pattern. To a nontrivial extent, the greatest triumph of the "Great Firewall" is not the ability to block content(at which it is rather mediocre); but the ability to block particular companies. User studies consistently show that even minor inconveniences(delays of a few seconds, little site usability glitches, and the like) deter consumers on the web. Being put on the "Great Firewall"'s hit list would definitely qualify as an inconvenience to any web-based business. Nice site you have there, wouldn't want anything to umm, come between, you and your customers...
That's the real trick. If you have leverage over the companies, they will be oh so careful to toe the line(and if the line isn't clear, they'll just toe extra carefully). The "Great Firewall" gives leverage over web-based companies. Wireless telcomms are, presumably, beholden for spectrum and tower siting permissions, and they know it(presumably, there are fat state and military comms contracts, as well).
If you try to emulate the East German model of "Hey, let's have something like half the population working, at least informally, for state intelligence" you'll spend so much of your GDP on guns that your people will run out of butter and turn the guns on you. That just doesn't work all that well, medium to long term. However, if you create a system where there is real money to be made, just by following a few little political rules, suddenly the profit-seekers will go from being your enemies to being your hatchetmen. Any successful police state will work in this fashion(or be literally starving and falling apart, I'm looking at your DPRK..)
Re:Hit 'em where it hurts (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:OMG (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Next move (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Let me be the first to say (Score:3, Insightful)
I consider that in no government power can be abused long. Mankind will not bear it. If a sovereign oppresses his people to a great degree, they will rise and cut off his head.
While I generally agree with this (witness the former Soviet Bloc, the American South etc.) I sometimes wonder if it always applies. For example, the conditions in North Korea have been appalling for 50+ years. How much longer before the people rise up and cut off the sovereign's head?
Re:And let the war begin (Score:4, Insightful)
This war could be really hard. But in the end, it's the Chinese people who lose, not Google nor the Chinese "government".
In historical context the Chinese people are currently relative winners.
China has a long history of extremely violent and bloody revolutions. The relative political stability of the past 60 years is pretty much unprecedented. If the past is any indication, the transformation to complete freedom in China is not likely to go as peacefully as it did with the Soviet Union.
Sudden change in China usually results in the deaths of millions. They have little history of peaceful change. The government has an obligation to tread cautiously.
Re:Google needs to pull out. (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Let me be the first to say (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Ping Pong (Score:3, Insightful)
Google doesn't want to provoke China to take its employees hostage or something.
Re:OMG (Score:5, Insightful)
Nice strawman. Slashdot is full of left-libertarian US citizens, and we've been wailing about our less enlightened national policies for years. I for one would love to see Dick Cheney sharing a jail cell with Hu Jintao and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, but every time one of the latter two gentleman is a topic of discussion, I always see dozens of comments saying "what about Guantanamo Bay/Abu Grahib/warrantless wiretapping blah blah blah?" - as if that excuses any amount of misbehavior by other governments. Well, I think we should withdraw all our troops from foreign countries, try or release everyone at Guantanamo, and send the entire Bush administration to the ICC. Do I have your permission to criticize the Chinese government now, or are you going to start whining about something else?
Besides all that, the simple fact is that the US legal system continues to be more permissive of unbridled free speech than almost any other country in the world. We send people to jail for all sorts of stupid reasons that I certainly don't support, but you can march through Washington DC with a sign comparing Obama to Hitler, and mutter about a 2nd American Revolution, and you won't be hauled off to jail. Most of us wouldn't have it any other way.
Re:Ping Pong (Score:5, Insightful)
As any Slashdot Libertarian will tell you, corporations are more efficient than governments(and this is often true, though neither so often nor so dramatically as the Slashdot Libertarians would have it).
It's true pretty much all of the time. The problem that the libertarians miss is that the interests of the corporation align with those of the population very rarely. Somehow, it's not particularly reassuring when you are being exploited to know that the exploitation is happening very efficiently. Someone working inefficiently on your behalf is usually better than someone working efficiently against you.
Re:OMG (Score:5, Insightful)
h. Those that live in the US will be quick to point out the heinousness of Chinese policy, but very slow to recognize anything untoward in their own country's policies, foreign or domestic. Way too much Kool-Aid.
Nice attempt at the appearance of "balanced viewpoint", but it seems like you are either a. ignorant of the United States and its people, b. just America-bashing for the fun of it or (and this is my personal favorite) c. just ignorant. Either way, you're the one sucking down the Kool-Aid. As it happens, a lot of us are pretty damned dissatisfied with our various forms of government here, and we're pretty damn vocal about it. We can talk about it on public forms like this one. We can call the President of the United States a porchmonkey if we want to, and nobody will arrest us (although some of our neighbors might burn down our house.) We can even, if we get sufficiently worked up about it, change how our government(s) operate. It's not easy, to be sure, but is still a lot more than anyone living in China (or any other totalitarian regime) can say for themselves. So watch your tongue.
And we have every right to point out the heinousness of Chinese policy because it is heinous. Whether or not you like the United States doesn't change that fact one little bit.
Re:OMG (Score:5, Insightful)
No, your government just bombs the fuck out of countries that disagree with them...
Only if they have something we want, just like every major power since the Roman Empire has done, all throughout history. We don't agree with North Korea, for example ... they don't have a single goddamn thing we want, but do keep making threatening noises about nuking our allies, so we keep buying them off with free food and diesel fuel. So we don't bomb other nations just because they disagree with us: fact is, most of the world is full of complete assholes who disagree with us, and while actually do have enough bombs to take care of them all, there wouldn't be much left when we finished the job.
Re:Let me be the first to say (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:OMG (Score:4, Insightful)
You better check again the provenience of each component of your computer. Odds are at least one of them was made in China.
Re:OMG (Score:3, Insightful)
But in the European Union you can do that, and you are protected with medical care to boot. Your way is not the only way, even with the many good things you can do.
What's your point? I would never claim that the US government is anything close to a perfect system; the debate is about free speech and laws restricting to it. And while I think the EU is mostly very good on civil liberties and better than us on some other unrelated issues, it's worth mentioning that they are far more willing to restrict speech - and I'm not just talking about Germany's prohibitions on Holocaust denial. Google "Ireland blasphemy" if you're curious. On the moral scale, this can't compare to the thousands of civilian deaths in Iraq and Afghanistan, but it's one instance where the US clearly is superior.
Re:Let me be the first to say (Score:3, Insightful)
Worth remembering that most people in early-to-mid USSR believed all that, too.
Re:And let the war begin (Score:3, Insightful)
It didn't go peacefully in the USSR, either. For one thing, you might have noticed that there's no such country, anymore. And then there were:
Sumgait massacre [wikipedia.org]
War in Nagorno-Karabakh [wikipedia.org]
War in South Ossetia [wikipedia.org]
War in Abkhazia [wikipedia.org]
War in Transnistria [wikipedia.org]
Civil war in Tajikistan [wikipedia.org]
and many more.
War in Chechnya is also, to large extent, a legacy of the Soviet collapse.
Re:OMG (Score:3, Insightful)
We can even, if we get sufficiently worked up about it, change how our government(s) operate.
Almost certainly false. You can't even muster up a viable third party, something your neighbours to the north have been doing with clockwork regularity every thirty years or so for the past century.
The American system of government is broken. Congress has approval ratings that regularly dip below 20% and sometimes into the single digits, but incumbents are returned over 80%, sometimes over 90%, of the time. That is the reality of your broken governmental system. You can SAY anything you damned well please, so long as (a very few of) you vote for one of two almost identical parties.
The only reason the anti-conservative radicals of the Republican Party and the sometime budget-balancers of the Democratic Party look so completely different to you is that they are the only two tiny bumps on the otherwise atomically smooth surface of mainstream American politics. You have a populace so politically naive that a set of minor tweaks to your broken for-profit health care system is considered "socialism", for heavens sake!
All of which said: obvious the US is in pretty much infinitely better shape, culturally and politically, than China, who are shooting themselves in the foot with this ridiculous policy. The Chinese people need access to information to prosper, and by attempting to restrict it the Chinese government is in epic fail territory.
Re:Ping Pong (Score:3, Insightful)
The government may outlaw child porn and make copyright law increasingly onerous, but it doesn't try to use censorship to protect its own position. In China, on the other hand. . . well, I'll just quote a section of their criminal code:
The difference being that the Chinese system is incredibly fragile. It is unable to withstand the utterly devastating assault of one lone individual saying, "Hey, I think our government is doing something really stupid. This is why..."
The American system, despite being utterly broken in almost every important respect, is more than comfortable with that kind of critique.
Really, it comes down to a measure of how robustly powerful the Anglo-European system of democratic government is compared to every other model, particularly the delicate and flimsy Chinese model, which apparently needs draconian laws to protected it from the dangerous scourge of... bloggers!
It would be dead funny, if those Chinese Communist losers didn't actually kill innocent Chinese people who want nothing but to have their voices heard as one amongst many in the true song of Chinese democracy.
Re:Ping Pong (Score:3, Insightful)
The problem that the libertarians miss is that the interests of the corporation align with those of the population very rarely. Somehow, it's not particularly reassuring when you are being exploited to know that the exploitation is happening very efficiently.
Err, that's different from government how? Most of what my elected politicians due is not to my benefit; they pander to the masses in order to get reelected and maintain their positions of power. Whether that happens to mean signing into law a construction project that no one except the workers needs, or just plain lying about something, it really doesn't align with my interests.
Re:Ping Pong (Score:3, Insightful)
Funny - you should try talking to some members of the Revolutionary Communist Party about how hard they have had to work to be able to pass out newspapers and how many of their membership have been shut up in the process. You'd be surprised how many of them are still living underground hiding from the government here.
sigh. . .
I'm familiar with Chairman Bob's histrionics, and I don't believe a single fucking word of it. We see this all the time coming from armchair revolutionaries, okay? Lyndon LaRouche is a particularly notorious case; I'm not sure if there's any part of the US (or British!) government that he hasn't claimed is out to destroy him. No one is stopping the RCP from - for instance - setting up a large display in the middle of UC Berkeley campus explaining how the Cultural Revolution was actually really awesome, and how the counter-revolutionaries had it coming anyway. Dude, I could seriously walk over there and buy one of their newspapers tomorrow. The police, who have much more serious villainy to deal with, leave them alone as long as they don't try to incite riots that result in property destruction.
It's sort of the price you pay for living in the Bay Area - we get beautiful scenery, temperate climate, liberal social atmosphere, and we also get California government and some of the most obnoxious, self-righteous far-left remnants in the country. They're clinging to a glorious past that never really existed, and dreaming of unleashing yet another massive bloodletting, and they're desperately, futilely trying to convince everyone else that they still matter - and they don't. I grit my teeth and bear it, because, after all, at least they haven't started any wars recently, and it seems churlish to get upset about these fools when Dick Cheney is still enjoying his retirement.
Re:OMG (Score:3, Insightful)
The American voting system is completely broken, but that example you give has nothing to do with it.
As a whole Congressional approval is always low because no one likes those 98 senators and 434 representatives wasting our money on pork-barrel projects in their districts. But what we do like are those 2 senators and 1 representative bringing money and jobs to our district, thus individually they tend to have high approval and are easily reelected. That's one of the few parts of our system that actually makes sense.
Re:OMG (Score:3, Insightful)
Nice straw man, but these laws aren't really enacted (Downfall, the source of the angry Hitler videos broke all the German taboo's and with near universal accolades in Germany, also the angry Hitler video's are quite popular with ze Germans). Same with Ireland, when was the last person charged with blasphemy (HINT: Ireland is holding a referendum to have it removed from their constitution). The only difference between saying something immensely stupid in Europe and saying something immensely stupid in America is the American police wont take you to safety before some redneck takes it upon himself to correct your thinking.
The US has as many restrictions on free speech as Europe, they are just enforced differently.
Re:Ping Pong (Score:3, Insightful)
No, I'd barely even say it's true half the time.
The thing libertarians and just about everyone else misses is, as long as a corporation is making money a great deal of inefficiency goes unnoticed. No one cares as the bottom line looks good. Seeing as Government services are about the "service" not the "bottom line" they always get noticed for any inefficiency. Corporate efficiency is only looked at when a corporation is losing money (including share price). Take the US health care system, insurance companies are making money hand over fist but the process is so bureaucratic and inefficient.
As ScrewMaster said, smart governments move to a corporate management model for services to get rid of the bureaucracy but maintain the government ownership (taxpayer funded) keeping emphasis on service provision not the bottom line (hence it's a corporation that is always losing money). It's called corpoatisation.
Re:"We make and manage information." (Score:1, Insightful)
Yeah - but things like software patents and out-of-hand patent system in general is starting to make a difference.
I already hear screeching noises when developing houses are more and more attacked by patent trolls. The same for medicine and other stuff.
At the end the country with the less restrictions will will stay in first gear with R&D, while an increasing stringent patent and other suppressing system will bring development in the USA to a grinding halt, or at least slow down considerably.
You can say a lot about China (and you would be right), but they are not so stupid to let big company's and patent trolls decide what can be researched, developed and build - or not.
Sure - the government is keeping those things in hand, but general you will see a increasing development and research cycle with little restrictions. It would not surprise me if China would surpass the USA in certain fields in not too far distance.
Unbridled greed can be as much devastating as a totalitarian government.
Re:And let the war begin (Score:5, Insightful)
China has a long history of extremely violent and bloody revolutions. The relative political stability of the past 60 years is pretty much unprecedented. If the past is any indication, the transformation to complete freedom in China is not likely to go as peacefully as it did with the Soviet Union. Sudden change in China usually results in the deaths of millions. They have little history of peaceful change. The government has an obligation to tread cautiously.
Though oddly enough, the "relative political stability of the past 60 years" in China has also resulted in the deaths of millions....
The PRC government may trot out "stability" as a justification for their authoritarian policies, but if push comes to shove, there's little doubt they're quite willing to sacrifice large numbers of their populace to stay in power.
Re:Google needs to pull out. (Score:3, Insightful)
The labor movement put a stop to child labor, indentured servitude, and gave the workers rights that the robber barons denied them. You can hate unions all you like, but don't try to play it off like the labor movement had no positive results. They're one of the main reasons there is such a thing as a middle class.
Re:Ping Pong (Score:2, Insightful)
I'm sure you can find some equally brain-dead sections of US legal code, but the only thing even close to this in intent would be direct threats against the life of the president.
Being from outside the US I've always found it interesting that the position of the president is held in such regard. In a sense you argued against yourself by in this last statement. Why should the penalties for conspiring to murder the president be any different than conspiring to murder your neighbour. I agree the president's job is likely more important than your neighbours, unless your neighbour is about to find a cure for cancer, but is the president's life any more important?
The fact that the president is idolized is not that different than what the Chinese do with respect to the State. I've always found it interesting that I've never heard anyone argue about the view of american president's.