Tuesday, March 23, 2010

The power of one unnamed source

UPDATE, 3/23, 1:26 pm: Google's statement, China's (via Xinhua) response.

I'm glad to see not ever news organization has jumped on this, but ever since Wall Street Journal quoted one unnamed source on Sunday as saying that Google will announce its imminent departure from China, lots of folks have taken it for truth. If it happens, it happens, I suppose. I won't get into the details in this space (you can read TechCrunch's excellent summary of the situation from January) except to say I would much rather have seen Google forced out, as then maybe China's state media can stop harking on the "Google is just making a selfish business move" angle.

Google very well may be looking after its (domestic) business interests by pulling out, but that seems beside the point. The issue none of the state-owned op-ed sections wants to scrutinize is censorship, something that takes a dramatically different form here than in the U.S. (let's just say there're a couple media personalities in the U.S. that make me very much want to apply China's censorship policies to that country).

According to WSJ's unnamed source, an announcement of some sort is happening later today. Stay tuned?

1 comment:

Unknown said...

if google stays in china, and does not censor its search results, it is breaking chinese law. google's new stance is that they will no longer supply censored results, and the only way to do that legally is to reroute traffic to one of their servers outside of the country.

dr
http://entropy2.com/