Roy Schestowitz <newsgroups@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> espoused:
> __/ [ dapunka ] on Wednesday 13 June 2007 11:33 \__
>
>>
>> Roy Schestowitz wrote:
>>> Yahoo stockholders vote against anticensorship proposal
>>>
>>> ,----[ Quote ]
>>> | Yahoo shareholders voted down a proposal that would have forced
>>> | management to adopt stronger policies regarding government attempts
>>> | to limit Internet access and to curtail freedom of speech in
>>> | countries where Yahoo operates.
>>> `----
>>>
>>> http://www.linuxworld.com.au/index.php?id=813106908&rid=-50
>>>
>>> This was exactly the same story at Google. Investors can't give a damn
>>> about humanity; it's all about the money.
>>>
>>> Yahoo: China's censoring Flickr
>>>
>>> ,----[ Quote ]
>>> | Popular among a growing class of digital-photo enthusiasts in the
>>> | world's second-largest Internet market, Flickr has not shown photos
>>> | to users in mainland China since last week, amid rumors that Beijing
>>> | took action after images of the Tiananmen Square massacre in early
>>> | June 1989 were posted.
>>> `----
>>>
>>> http://news.zdnet.com/2100-9588_22-6190356.html
>>>
>>> 'Book burning' and deception is also a Microsoft turf (see below), so it's
>>> somewhat relevant. The same goes for greed.
>>
>> Yeah, Yahoo and Google's willingness to go along with China's
>> censorship crap is a money thing for sure - the Chinese market is /
>> huge/.
>
>
> There is certain stuff the SEs have been censoring since the very early days,
> as a matter of policy, and universally. It's a dilemma. In China, they have
> Baidu to compete against and they would get banned if they did not censor
> (there have recently been rumours about Baidu extending to the West as well,
> but that all got squashed last night).
>
> It's funny how the West needs to suck up to any repressive regime. At the
> time (last year), a panel in the states criticised the Big 3... Yahoo for
> letting the government get information that jailed a user... Google for
> censorship (which I think was made worse since the panelist/judge had
> witnessed the Holocaust and therefore had strong feelings on the matter)...
> I can't recall how Microsoft fit into this.
>
>
>> But there's another side to it: is it better for the Chinese people to
>> have access to a bowlderized internet, or should they have no net at
>> all?
>
> The Chinese government had been making policies that involve bans, usage
> limits, and censorship recently. They are not alone though. The Internet is
> transforming into something else and quite some time ago, people predicated
> that China would get its own (sub)Internet. There's also the idea of a
> Google dark Net... or an Internet where pages are not being published in the
> conventional way; instead, they just get submitted to an authority like a
> search engine. A centralised type of Web with authority would a scary
> transformation.
>
We had much the same issue with respect to a promise of an "Ethical
Foreign Policy" as promised by the labour party when they replaced the
last conservative government. It was really successful until someone
had to make a decision regarding a real issue, which was an arms deal
with middle-eastern country. Suddenly, all the ethical values went out
of the window and were replaced with a summary of the jobs at risk/stake
across the UK's various arms manufacturers, and the money involved, as
well as British prestige, and so on.
Since then, there've been a couple of attempts at investigating some
of the more dubious deals, but again, the Attorney General will back
off at the last, when it becomes clear just how deep the problems are.
Fundamentally, as soon as you have serious money involved, then corruption
of one kind or another is never very far behind. If you take a really
pragmatic look at how big business and governments operate, it can be
as difficult to see the differences between them and, say, international
mafioso, drugs cartels and so on, in the same way that sometimes trying
to spot the difference between police and criminal can be quite hard.
That's not to say that there aren't fine upstanding people working in
large companies, governments and the police, of course - I'm know that
there are very many of them, but that offers little protection from
corruption.
--
| Mark Kent -- mark at ellandroad dot demon dot co dot uk |
| Cola faq: http://www.faqs.org/faqs/linux/advocacy/faq-and-primer/ |
| Cola trolls: http://colatrolls.blogspot.com/ |
| My (new) blog: http://www.thereisnomagic.org |
|
|
