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January 25, 2006
Don't be evil, if it gains you market share
Google has bought in to the Great Firewall, just a few days after so courageously defending a list of trade-secret search terms from the US government! Huzzah’s all around. Fiduciary duty wins the day!
What amused me the most was Google’s talking head on Channel 4 pointed out that they hadn’t redacted the Tiananmen Massacre from Google’s entire index, just the Chinese version. He also pointed out that they filter Nazi content in Germany, and racist content in France. At least he had the good grace to be embarrassed when it was in turn pointed out to him that Nazi content in Germany is a far cry from pro-democracy content in China.
Now, I’ve read in the media that it’s easy to criticise Google from afar, but that it is an entirely different question, in today’s global market, when it may be your job on the line. Now, that’s interesting in a theoretical sense, but let’s be practical here: Google is the world’s biggest media corporation (by market capitalisation). They have so convincingly won this generation of the search market that Yahoo has publicly stated that they don’t expect to gain any market share. Noone’s job was in danger from Google simply continuing a policy which it had adopted for years: relying on Chinese internet users to raise enough of a stink that they remain (mostly) unblocked.
So, I call shenanigans on the whole “realities of the global marketplace” clap-trap: Google had a presence in China, albeit one that was periodically blocked. They quite openly acknowledge that people will still likely dodge around the Great Firewall if they’re able, so what’s changed for Google, besides uninterrupted access to their market?
In a slightly more-fun note, I cobbled together a script that will take the data exported from my heart-rate monitor and automatically graph and post it over to the right, so that I can have some abstract motivation to actually go out and get my heart going. All those graphs will look pretty neat.
Posted by matt at January 25, 2006 11:50 PM