Final Project Proposal: Google, CCP, and Evil?
Helping the Chinese governemnet controlling what Chinese users are allowed to search for? Google says YES.
Since Google’s launch of Google.cn (The Chinese google website) Jan 25, 2006, the serach engine has went against its own beliefs transpirancy and choice. It has been proved that sensitive topics such as “Independence for Taiwan” , “The 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre”, “Falun Gong”, as well as general Chinese human rights and democracy issues are filtered by Google.cn. This web censorship Google has complied to, conducted by the Chinese Communist Party, is today known as “The Great Red Firewall”.
Should the Chinese internet users, have a different standard of policies applied to them? Google feels this way.
The same technology, with the same slogan stating “At Google, we’re committed to transparency and choice”, is helping users to access the world through mouse clicks, while helping the Chinese Communist government to filter and censor information millions of Chinese people have the rights to know.
However, this phenomenon is not only applicable to Google, Google’s rivals Yahoo and Microsoft have long been using censorship in China.
Money and the abuse of power are essentially the cause of such phenomenon. If freedom is no longer our priority of online technology, what is then the future of Internet?
