University Wire
02-17-2006
(The Rebel Yell) (U-WIRE) LAS VEGAS -- Imagine a world where the United States' media is subject to Chinese censorship. Events such as the Tiananmen Square protests in 1989 are nowhere to be found in Web search results. Does this sound somewhat dreary? This is the reverse of what the U.S. government may be trying to coercively achieve with the top American technology companies. Google, Yahoo! and MSN, the latter owned by Microsoft, are the three top search engines in the country. All three are expanding worldwide to reach a broader audience, and all three are also incurring the wrath of our government.
Let's start from the beginning to get a feel for the situation. In 1989, the Chinese military forcibly put down a protest in Tiananmen Square by students and workers who were protesting the lack of a free media in China. These activists were violently suppressed and disbanded by the military in an effort to restore order.
China has always suppressed its media. All forms of public expression are subjected to censorship - even personal Web logs, known as blogs. With the launch of Google's new Chinese search engine, anyone searching for information on Tiananmen Square will find only the peaceful results of the actual square in Bejing. Nothing mentioning the massacre that happened will be returned (although, at one point after the launch of the engine, common misspellings of the square's name would invoke the "correct" results without censorship).
Yahoo! and MSN are in the same situation as Google. Both engines are cooperating with the Chinese government to return results acceptable to the communist party in order to operate in China. Microsoft recently shut down a personal Chinese blog hosted by the company after government officials demanded that it do so. The writer of the blog broached topics that the authorities did not like to have floating around in cyberspace.
So what's the big problem? Recently, the U.S. government accused the three companies, including Cisco Systems, of censoring free speech, which goes against American principle of an unrestricted media. Lawmakers attempted to get all four companies together earlier this year to talk about how business is done via the Internet in China, but none of them showed up (however, all four companies met with the U.S. government yesterday to discuss the matter).
The U.S. government's argument is that American technology companies are helping a dictatorship in China to crackdown on those that do not share their political views and filter media results for Chinese citizens. While it may be true that U.S. technology companies are playing by Chinese rules, it is for the best.
The U.S. government expects any company doing business in another country to abide by its rules. Taxes must be filed, certain subjects must not be broadcast publicly - such as pornography - and Internet businesses are still subject to the Federal Communications Commission's own censorship. So why is the U.S. government so upset about Google, Yahoo! and MSN?
It shouldn't be. American technology companies are doing what is in their best interests as a business. All companies strive to reach bigger markets and bigger profit margins. In order for these companies to do so, China must be reached with its one-billion-plus population. The U.S. government wants badly for its domestic corporations to thrive, but technology companies cannot thrive if they ignore China.
It is not the duty of U.S. businesses to facilitate change in China. Corporations are supposed to look out for their own good, not be the pawns of the U.S. government. It is wrong for one country to push its worldview on others, like our own leaders are doing in Iraq. This is equally true of companies from any nation that attempt to push their home country's political ideology on another.
American businesses are supposed to be concerned with improving the bottom line. The U.S. government is out of line in thinking that the likes of Google and MSN will bring free speech to the masses in China. It's their government, not ours. It is nobody's place to tell them how to run their own country. Only they have that right.
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(C) 2006 The Rebel Yell via U-WIRE
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