More takes on the launch of Google.cn: the company's response on the Official Google Blog, and protests from the Students for a Free Tibet Blog. Elinor Mills of CNet News.com posted her roundup on her CNet blog.
Ars Technica covers a few other Google-related stories this week: Ken Fisher gives his review of Google Video, his disappointment with the service, and what he thinks is the company's reasoning for introducing it early. Nate Anderson talks about Google, Sun, and Lenovo's anti-spyware coalition, and also a spectacularly crass and greedy lawsuit against the company and its implications for the future of Google and copyright law.
And two Yahoo VPs are denying that the company is giving up on search and pledging a commitment to innovation and new products. They don't contradict statements made earlier by Yahoo execs, but merely clarify those statements: Yahoo never claimed to be abandoning its search engine, simply that it wasn't aiming to crush Google in an attempt to be number one.
That's all the linkage we have time for, since we're still busy writing up our proposal on how Google can free all oppressed people of Earth, end world hunger, and invent a perpetual motion engine.
Image from the Students for a Free Tibet website
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Dear SFist Chuck
Thank you for writing about the protests against Google. Their complicity in China's oppression of the Tibetan people and the ideals of freedom and democracy is truly grevious. While I noted a tinge of sarcasm in your closing sentences, I have to assume that as someone with the ability to have an internet site where you can post your opinions freely, you must value freedom of speech and information on some level yourself. No one from the Free Tibet movement or the democracy movement dare ask Google to "free all oppressed people of the Earth" but we do believe that as an American company started by Stanford students who (again presumably) value the conditions under which they were able to learn about anything they wanted in school, the company has the desire, nay responsibility, to NOT impede the movements of people within Tibet and China to educate themselves in the manner promised by Universal Charter of Human Rights. To do so would be hypocrisy at the very least. Right now, Google is simply assisting a brutal authoritarian regime in its activities and by this, it's occupation of Tibet.
Thank you,
Tsering
Because I was sarcastic and flippant (more than just "a tinge") in my closing comment, I should make one thing clear: the oppression by the Chinese government of its own people and those of Tibet is serious and grievous, and that is an issue that shouldn't be taken lightly, nor is it one on which reasonable people can disagree.
Where reasonable people can disagree, though, is on how a company can react to the issue. We can continue to treat China as a closed market and view any move into that market as being complicit in evil. Personally, I don't see how that gains anything other than allowing the government to become increasingly isolationist and oppressive.
Google has voiced its objection to the censorship. They've been very open about their policy and their reservations about the decision. My sarcasm is directed at those who would ignore those statements and the company's reservations, and immediately cynically accuse the company of abandoning its philosophy for the sake of making a buck.