Larry Lessig, take a look at this one. It
demonstrates how Google and Microsoft and all the others slide down the
slippery slope toward the repressive future your describe in
Code. This is the best article I have seen anywhere on Google in
China..Read the whole article here, from the Australian. Thank you John Gapper!
>Net giants beware: freedom may not last
John Gapper
January 31, 2006
SILICON Valley came to the mountains of Switzerland at Davos last week.
Was it my imagination or did its leaders look shamefaced?
Normally, figures such as Bill Gates of Microsoft and Sergey Brin and
Larry Page of Google are as proud as other software engineers. They are
richer and smarter than most of us and they believe that they are
improving our way of life.
Making money by making the world a better place is nice work if you
can get it. Google’s founders are so convinced they combine the two
that they made “Don’t be evil” a founding principle. But what happens
when business interests clash with ethics? That is occurring in China -
not only to Google, but to Microsoft and Yahoo - and it ought to make
them worried.
Gates teased Eric Schmidt, chief executive of Google, at the
World Economic Forum in Davos after Schmidt ran through the company’s
strained defence of why it was censoring its search service in China.
It was better to run a local search engine that blocked access to sites
than to deny local citizens a speedy Google, he said. It was the lesser
of two evils.
Gates had fun with that, pointing out that “Don’t be evil” is
not a relative commandment. But Microsoft’s chairman has little to be
proud of. His company shut down the blog of a Chinese activist that the
country’s government did not like. Quizzed about that at another Davos
event, Gates indulged in a bit of relativism himself: it was the price
that had to be paid for bringing a liberating technology to China.