Touching on something recent, I'd like to point out Google's race in China to secure a foothold in the country where it dominates 30 percent of the country's search engine market.
China is known for censoring its media and its citizen's access to internet. With mainly Chinese owned search engines like Sina.com and Ganji.com, the country seems to be self sustaining without the Californian company's help. China's recent attempt in hacking into the search engine to monitor some searches by activist group has left Google baffled. Google then threatened to lift its censorship of its censorship in protest but in doing so has left China accusing the company of violating their agreed contract.
Mighty and powerful in America, the 11-year-old search engine has penetrated the lives of people around the world but is having difficulty handling China because the country can block access to Google's service at any time. And that would mean Google losing its 30 percent market dominance and all the advertising revenues that comes with it.
Clearly the battle is for economical reasons. However, Google's founder Sergey Brin, apparently a vocal advocate of freedom of speech, said no to a self-censoring Google search engine in China to uphold the right to free speech. It is after all stated in the second paragraph of the UDHR.
Say Google's intention is really to advocate freedom of speech in China, is it right for them to go into a country where its values are different than those of liberal America and say that they should not censor their search engines? Who's right, who's wrong?
On the other hand, freedom of speech is a right agreed by many world leaders. Can China being one of today's leading powers get away with 'protecting' its citizens through censorship?
Google is not budging on this matter and is still under negotiation with China after angering them for moving their search engine site to Hong Kong where they're not censored.
On a lighter note, my Chinese roommate mentioned today that she will be getting a Facebook account other than her Chinese version of Facebook.
I think that in order for humans to make informed decisions, there has to be freedom of information. Based on this principle, the Chinese government is clearly violating their citizen's rights by censoring information over the internet. I think the argument that they are protecting their citizens is clearly flawed.
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