Google is threatening to stop doing business in China. The two articles that are sources for this article are from Power Line Blog yesterday and The New Republic, also yesterday. Both articles cite incidents of the security or privacy of internet users being compromised.
Power Line Blog points out:
"First, this attack was not just on Google. As part of our investigation we have discovered that at least twenty other large companies from a wide range of businesses--including the Internet, finance, technology, media and chemical sectors--have been similarly targeted. We are currently in the process of notifying those companies, and we are also working with the relevant U.S. authorities.
"Second, we have evidence to suggest that a primary goal of the attackers was accessing the Gmail accounts of Chinese human rights activists. Based on our investigation to date we believe their attack did not achieve that objective. ...
"Third, as part of this investigation but independent of the attack on Google, we have discovered that the accounts of dozens of U.S.-, China- and Europe-based Gmail users who are advocates of human rights in China appear to have been routinely accessed by third parties."
Admittedly, we all need to be careful what we post or send on the internet, but there is a general expectation of privacy. That expectation obviously flies in the face of the control exercised by totalitarian governments, so I guess we should not be surprised by the kind of privacy violations we see here.
The New Republic points out:
"Google's overriding business goal is to encourage us to devote more of our time and entrust more of our personal information to the Internet, particularly to the online "computing cloud" that is displacing the PC hard drive as the center of personal computing. The more that we use the Net, the more Google learns about us, the more frequently it shows us its ads, and the more money it makes. In order to continue to expand the time people spend online, Google and other Internet companies have to make the Net feel like a safe, well-protected space. If our trust in the Web is undermined in any way, we'll retreat from the network and seek out different ways to communicate, compute, and otherwise store and process data. The consequences for Google's business would be devastating."
When you consider the growth of the internet over the past fifteen years, it is easy to understand why Google would leave China. The fact that Google has left China also points out a basic difference between commerce in a free society and commerce in a highly controlled society. In a free society, Google can do business and protect its users. This allows for instant communication and information to flow through that society. In a highly controlled society, that communication is limited and the income and forward progress related to it does not happen.
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