Before the doom and gloomers start (looking below I'm a bit late, but anyways..), think about this from a practical perspective.
We can assume two things as indisputable facts:
1) Google is a multinational company.
2) To operate in a given country necessitates complying with that country's laws.
If a local country's laws say that you can't deny the holocaust (Germany) or speak ill of the king (Thailand) or talk about how corrupt the government is (Russia), or link to something that might be copyrighted (USA), or what have you, Google's options are limited to either compliance, or ceasing operations there.
What do you think would happen if Google took a public hardass stance like "We refuse to censor user content under any circumstances"? Admirable, and that would make them a darling on the internet, but only as long as it took for the local apparatchik to note that the company is violating local laws, and shuts down their operations there or worse.
Google's best bet in this case is exactly what they've done here - try to limit the spread of the local censorship from its local area. Just because Thailand's king gets easily butthurt is no reason for people outside of Thailand to suffer for the actions of a partially corrupt regime there..
If you have a better (and most importantly REALISTIC) idea, I'd love to hear it.
I believe Google has a moral responsibility to fight censorship. I understand your stance, and it makes sense under the assumption that Google should do what's best for themselves (and shareholders), but that's wrong. Following local law doesn't absolve them of that evil.
Edit: In response to having a better idea, Google isn't a powerless agent in this situation. They can take a hard stance without being completely cut out of that country. It may suck short-term, but it creates a better Internet long-term and that matters for them.
You absolutists have really tied their hands. There is no country with a concept of something being more illegal than something else - there is only legal and illegal with (theoretically) higher sentences for worse crimes. Denying the hololcaust in Germany is just as much of a crime as fraud.
I'd hate to be in Google's shoes right now. They can't win. If they keep going in a country despite the laws, they'll just be shut down and then the shareholders (and anyone else with a rational mind) will be miffed. If they follow the law, the shareholders will be happy, but some people in some areas will have their rights trampled on.
I think your fight is with the government passing corrupt laws that everyone is beholden to, not the company following the law like everyone else.
Asking a company to break local laws on principal sounds nice, but in the real world, it isn't gonna happen, for a number of very good reasons.
I don't identify as an absolutist and I agree it's not a black-and-white situation. It sucks for the reasons you mention.
But even if it's their legal obligation to follow, I still believe it's morally wrong for them to do so. Their position isn't so weak that they're powerless. As a business their incentives may be really strong, but I don't believe that absolves them of the moral component. Just because taking a hard stance is hard doesn't mean it's OK not to take it. But it is understandable, certainly for a complex, multifaceted organization.
And I agree, it's not just about Google. I think everyone shares at least some responsibility, from the government to the businesses to the citizens. But just because it's practical for Google to censor doesn't mean they are no longer morally responsible for taking part in censorship.
Hopefully Google will at least be active in fighting the laws and maybe that is their full intention.
I don't think it helps to talk about censorship in the abstract. We can start with the position that "all censorship is bad", but we quickly get into the same tricky problems that first amendment cases do (where do my rights end and yours begin), not to mention that "free speech" is literally defined differently in different countries.
Next, we can look at things like if censoring certain types of material is ever wrong. Citizens reporting on each other for anti-patriotic behavior horrifies us, but I have no problem with Google reporting a site that hosts child pornography if they discover it while indexing images (I don't agree with the thoughtcrime laws that child pornography seems to engender, but I certainly have no problem with that site being shut down).
Since we're looking at an American company, what about DMCA take down notices? Many on this site have serious problems with the way those laws are enforced and in how they favor large content conglomerates, but if companies were to not follow them, large segments of companies on the internet simply could not exist (if based in the US). Is it morally wrong for them to honor these takedown notices? What if most are in fact legitimate (in our copyright system, not some platonic one!), they just deny due process to some minority? Is there a moral difference between a court order and a national security notice?
There's an easy transition from these questions to ones of censoring hate speech and incitement to violence, to censoring Holocaust-denial and Nazism, to censoring criticism of the King.
If we're going to draw a bright line for companies we will financially support, we'll have to talk about specifics, because "censorship" won't cut it (what did you fund with your taxes this year?), and we really are going to have to talk about "I don't want an American company censoring blog posts in India because I think the laws there (that some portion of the population likely supports) are wrong". And then we'll have to call up someone in the EU that supports "the right to forget" and see what they think of our notion of free speech and censorship.
What, specifically, would you have them do? Are you advocating a full hard-line stance? That they will not take down anything, ever? Or that they won't take down things if they feel the reason is political oppression? Or what?
Those questions are not rhetorical. You haven't said, really, what you believe their moral obligation is, only that they are falling short of it.
Google's mission is to "organise the world's information". If that's the case, isn't allowing special interest groups the power to alter what information is presented a violation of that mission?
"Organise the world's information, except where it makes some people butthurt" is a much less attractive proposition.
Didn't Google stop operating in China a few years ago because they'd rather lose business than support censorship? Then they said, "ah, fuck it, censorship's cool if your country has a billion ad-watching eyeballs". Now this is like the "censorship for everyone!" service pack.
I think the answer is to make it easy for people to host their own content. Sort of an "anti-cloud". FreedomBox is a great concept, you guys that are better hackers than me (most of you) should find some way to contribute: http://freedomboxfoundation.org
I think it was more that Baidu.com is the state sponsored competitor to Google China, and pretty much have been wiping the floor with Google in that country.
That move, claiming they were going to pull out of China because 12 email accounts were hacked (of human rights activists that weren’t even living in China) was pure PR that everyone was more than willing to lap up.
Same thing with that "Microsoft is indexing our results". As soon as you looked at the details, the PR dissolved.
Just 12 accounts hacked from China, really? I think it's pretty well documented that the hacking issues were more way more extensive than 12 account.
It's debatable whether it was government sponsored hacking or private citizens but regardless, it's a gross understatement to say it's 12 accounts. My own personal Gmail account from a Chinese IP a few days before the Google PR post.
No one doubts that IPs coming from China log-in-with-stolen-passwords into Gmail, hotmail, and mail.yahoo every single day.
Or that there are attempts to steal worthy information and data through other means.
Some of these attempts are state-sponsored, some are corporate-sponsored, others are crime-sponsored.
Russia does this, US does this, and just about every other player does this.
This happens every day.
It's nothing new.
The point is that Google entered China (the #1 known player in this game of hacking and espionage), then when the expected happened, used it's PR machine to pretend they were pulling out because of some of these attempts, with the main focus (in that PR attempt) on the dozen email accounts of activists.
The IE's toolbar reports click-throughs on links, even on Google search results.
Those click-throughs are weighted with 100s of other factors to establish a presence and relevance in Bing's index.
A dozen Google engineers spent a considerable time and effort trying to insert terms into Bing's index using the IE toolbar.
And all they could do was get a dozen terms through, nonsense terms such as "hiybbprqag", that had no other ranking factors. That last part is the important part (figure it out if you can).
What I call this is spamming, with a 10% success rate (I think they tried to game 100 terms into Bing’s index).
And then Google spined it for all it was worth.
Reporting CTR on links is about as standard as it gets.
So, per your admission, Microsoft's software monitors user behavior on a competitor's site (among others) and sends it back to the mothership, then they use that information to tune Bing's algorithm. How many of these data points do you think they get per day from all of their competitors? Millions?
If you seriously don't see the problem with that, then it doesn't brook further discussion. If your competitors got a leg up on your business to any degree because they were able to post-process the results of your work, you'd be furious.
If Bing (via IE+toolbar) improves its results for me by watching MY behavior (behavior I OWN, not Google), regardless if I'm on HN, on Amazon, on Google, or on some random-website, I'm fine with it.
Watching IE (+toolbar) users' behavior is not the same thing as using Google's work.
If you can't come to terms with the way click-stream data is gathered and how post processing works, that's your failure, not Bing's.
It's like if you don't get spoon fed exactly the flavor you expect (the one that agrees with your preconceived notion), you spit it back in my face.
Google came out and blatantly said Microsoft is copying its index. That is nothing more than a simple lie, that's designed to be easier to believe over a more complex truth.
Wow, the best thing about that article is the reference to http://google.com/ncr (No country redirect) - finally a way to stop Google from re-directing me to whatever country I'm in.
I hear about things like this and think we really need something like Diaspora: a unified, social interface being run on highly distributed systems. The benefits of things like Blogspot, Twitter and Facebook without the leverage points a few big companies ruling it all provide.
By utilizing ccTLDs, content removals can be managed on a per country basis, which will limit their impact to the smallest number of readers. Content removed due to a specific country's law will only be removed from the relevant ccTLD.
So after a local authority demands that a blog post be removed, it will still be available at *.blogspot.com
Yeah, this article is pretty much just terrible reporting.
If this tech reporter utilized their long term memory (or a search engine), they would remember everyone reporting on the google transparency report, which tells you exactly how much content each government has asked them to take down, and how many times they've complied with those requests. They would also have remembered the notes in that report that said that google was doing this exact same censorship to comply with eg Indian or German laws while not removing the content for the rest of the world
I mean, seriously? "Ebay thought that they could hide it, but hidden away in their TOS are rules for country-specific censorship, like hiding nazi memorabilia in german search results. It appears that Ebay snuck those terms in there 11 fucking years ago."
Censorship: it's a really hard problem. Luckily we have tech reporters.
It's not going away, it's just evolving (albeit in a less than stellar direction). An enterprising individual will be prepared to take advantage of the forthcoming restrictions and profit from them.
We can assume two things as indisputable facts: 1) Google is a multinational company. 2) To operate in a given country necessitates complying with that country's laws.
If a local country's laws say that you can't deny the holocaust (Germany) or speak ill of the king (Thailand) or talk about how corrupt the government is (Russia), or link to something that might be copyrighted (USA), or what have you, Google's options are limited to either compliance, or ceasing operations there.
What do you think would happen if Google took a public hardass stance like "We refuse to censor user content under any circumstances"? Admirable, and that would make them a darling on the internet, but only as long as it took for the local apparatchik to note that the company is violating local laws, and shuts down their operations there or worse.
Google's best bet in this case is exactly what they've done here - try to limit the spread of the local censorship from its local area. Just because Thailand's king gets easily butthurt is no reason for people outside of Thailand to suffer for the actions of a partially corrupt regime there..
If you have a better (and most importantly REALISTIC) idea, I'd love to hear it.