What do you do when your lofty, altruistic mission conflicts with your naked ambition? Well, if you're Google, apparently, you cave.
"Google's mission is to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful."
Sounds great, except someone forgot to tell the folks at Google that China happens to be part of our universe.
Where librarians fight for intellectual freedom and access to information, Google fights for its right to earn money in a restrictive environment. In an online article in The Register, a San Francisco attorney states, "This a simple matter of Google adhering to the Chinese dictate...China is a sovereign nation, and they can set their own laws. You can't force a company to go up against a country." But the company can choose whether or not to do business there.
In the same article, Google spokesman Gabriel Stricker is quoted as saying, "By being in China, we help people access more information, and when we do restrict information, we make clear that we've done so." The problem is when you start making these kinds of rationalizations, where does the line drawing end?
[Article found at Library Link of the Day]
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment