Google Finally Taking A Hard-line Approach To China Censorship!
Hello,
Regardless of your stance on the Google/Yahoo/Bing search wars, one of the major wars going on in the search world has been the issue of China and censorship.
In what China tries to call "protecting our people" over issues such as anti-government content - which is realistically nothing more than a governmental attempt to continue to impose further government restrictions upon it's people by the government itself - which, I guess if you prefer communistic governments might not be a bad thing, but for the rest of the free world, it is something disdained and seen as human rights violations - has been forcing internet companies that provide services within China to forcefully limit what the people of China can access and not access.
In a move that I can understand from a business perspective, and from only that, Google a few years back decided to allow the government of China to be able to decide what search results are returned and not returned within the google.cn search engine. It should be noted that google.cn is the second largest search engine within China.
In what I can only call a massively huge decision, earlier today Google pretty much told China "no more censorship!"
To quote their official press release:
As somebody who has had to deal with some legal issues with censorship of content when it comes to China, this decision on the part of Google makes me very happy! I am proud of Google for this hard-stance on their part. It is far past time that one of the big-boys in the technology world stand up to the government of China when it comes to censorship. Without such aggressive decisions by the biggest companies in the industry, those of us who are trying to build our websites and provide services to those in China, there is very little hope or chance that the major changes that need to be made will ever be made.
Now don't get me wrong, I am not saying that a government as old as the one that China has should go and change everything that defines who they are as a government for something (the internet) that has been around as short as the internet has... but anybody (the government of China, that is) who fails to realize that something that is growing as fast as the internet is (there are more people in China on the internet than any other country in the world, btw) and that is simply not going to be stopped (by that I mean there is no way any government is going to stop the spread of content on the internet... it is beyond impossible at this point) and who really thinks they have a prays chance in communism of stopping their own people from getting access to whatever they want - are a group of people that are clearly so far out of touch with reality that they might as well just close up the doors and call it done and over with - or in this case, remove themselves from power and let the people govern according to common sense.
The censorship of content by a government in all cases except that which is vital to the national defense of the government is the very abhorrence of power of the government itself.
John B. Abela
 Creative Commons: Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs
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Author: abelajohnb
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Age: 36
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raised in a private christian school until his senior year, mr. abela has been around the christian faith nearly his entire life. at the age of twenty-two mr. abela was called to the ministry as a lay-minister where he served as a youth minister for nearly seven years and then...
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