Tags:
Journalism of Courage
Google has always had a bit of internal tension making its life difficult. On the one hand,theres its idealistic engineer,dont be evil self-image. And,on the other,theres the phenomenally successful tech company,one which essentially dominates Internet advertising,one to which so many of us turn when weve a question to ask that its name has become a verb. Cold business sense and idealism are usually a tough mix: and,so over the past few years,Google-the-company handed out concessions to the government of the Peoples Republic of China in order to tap the vast Chinese markets concessions that could be seen as contradicting the information should be everyones ethic of Google-the-idea. Google.cn,for example,blanked out search results related to the Tiananmen Square massacre of 1989,as well as results about a corruption investigation into a company once headed by the son of Chinese President Hu Jintao.
But it looks,this time,like things have reached breaking point. Google discovered that the infrastructure supporting its free email,Gmail,had been attacked from China; that the primary goal of the attackers was accessing the Gmail accounts of Chinese human rights activists. They,in return,said they are reviewing their China operations: in particular,they are no longer willing to continue censoring search results inside China even though they recognise it might mean the end of their China operations. Of course,that wont be more than a pin-prick for them currently: China provides a mere 1.4 per cent of Googles 2008 revenue of 21.8 billion.
