Brin Defends Google China

While taking a break from the activities at the World Economic Forum in Switzerland, Google co-founder Sergey Brin talked about Google.cn and the growing kerfuffle over Google's acquiescence to China's censorship demands.

WebProWorld Fortune Magazine's David Kirkpatrick "We ultimately made a difficult decision, but we felt that by participating there, and making our services more available, even if not to the 100 percent that we ideally would like, that it will be better for Chinese Web users, because ultimately they would get more information, though not quite all of it." He also noted how Google blocks content in the US when it receives a human rights activists will likely be surprised to find their work lumped in with kiddie porn and Nazism. Topics like "Falun Gong" and "human rights" get blocked routinely in China. Kirkpatrick then obtained an opposing viewpoint to Brin's position from Human Rights Watch leader Ken Ross, and noted his opinion on the subject: I'm sure Google justifies this by saying it's just a couple of search words that people can't get to, but it's very difficult for Google to do what they just did and avoid the slippery slope. The next thing they'll do is ask them to tell them who is searching for "Taiwan" or "independence" or "human rights." And then it's going to find itself in the position of turning over the names of dissidents or simply of inquisitive individuals, for imprisonment. Ross suggested that the search engines could face down China over censorship if they band together. That isn't going to happen, as none of the big search engines want to yield the promise of multi-billion dollar profits from the fast-growing Internet user base in China to homegrown efforts like Baidu, who do not have a problem following government dictates on content and search. Email the author to your Bookmarks. Add to document.write("Del.icio.us") | Yahoo! My Web David Utter is a staff writer for Murdok covering technology and business.