The wrong reason

Google is certainly no hero.

Well, it might be my hero, as I sit at my computer on a weekend, trying to find articles for a research paper. Or search for internships. Or release dates. Or, actually, a lot of things.

OK, I use Google every day, and so do millions of others. I can’t imagine life without it. And lately, the news has been covering the company’s latest move — refusing to serve China unless it releases its censorship stranglehold. But that doesn’t make the company a paragon of virtue.

China’s “Great Firewall” has been around for years, and so has Google China. The company was willing to give in and provide the search engine with censorship restrictions until this year. Google stopped censoring content last Monday because it was hacked by someone in China.

Good for Google — the authoritarian government in China takes censorship way too far. “Protecting its people” — yeah, right. The government is trying to keep political unrest (and porn) at bay. They’re full of it, and everyone knows it.

It’s about time someone stood up to them, though a Chinese search engine, Baidu, actually gets almost twice as much business as Google in China, so Google’s departure won’t hurt China badly; it’ll just be a political statement. But Google isn’t making its stand for humanitarian reasons.

They were hacked from within China, so now they’re pissed off, though no one seems to be sure who did the hacking. The government is denying it, but it also denies the crackdown in Tiananmen Square, among other things, so it is not exactly trustworthy.

Google has been lying down and accepting the censorship for years. They’re only willing to act and not accept being controlled when they’re fed up with doing business. Where has their moral compass been all these years? In their bank account.

Google still wants to do some business in China, though it will stop supplying the search engine. They get their statement but they still try to bring in some revenue from one of the biggest and fastest-growing nations in the world. They can still operate freely in Hong Kong, and the rest of the world thinks they’re doing the right thing.

They are doing the right thing, but it’s too little, too late. They’re not standing up to China for the right reasons. They’re not standing up for the rights of Chinese citizens.

Does that mean what they’re doing isn’t good? No, it is — it’s about time someone stood up to the Communist Party, for whatever reason. But while Google is right in finally taking a stand, it’s not for the people, and it’s not going to help the people.

It makes Google good. It doesn’t make it a hero.

 

E-mail: hanns@indiana.edu