>(pic courtesy)
A few days back Google published an article on its blog, stating its decision to move out of China or at least stop censoring its search results for Google.cn its chinese search page.

“In mid-December, we detected a highly sophisticated and targeted attack on our corporate infrastructure originating from China that resulted in the theft of intellectual property from Google. However, it soon became clear that what at first appeared to be solely a security incident–albeit a significant one–was something quite different. Read More.

An interesting article by TechCrunch covers the different sentiments around the web on this move. There are people applauding Google’s stand ‘against communism’ and other who state it has come to this only because Google was not the leading search engine of China anyway (It was Baidu) and there was no way it was going to be numero uno in the BIG C.
Read more on those two sides.

I frankly think both sides are too extremes. If Google was number one, then what it would do could be very different, but the thing is that its not on the top. So when it is not getting the largest market share in Big C, and it is seeing all sorts of ‘unethical’ surveillances by western standards it may not want to take it sitting down! So they are standing up and saying NO, which is fair enough.

While it may not be a decision made solely against the communism in China due to ethical reasons, it would still be a blow to the communistic regime of China. That is the other issue here, the Chinese communism. Towards this I read an interesting article today, it states that while China has been doing a lot of talk towards becoming capitalist and it opening up its market, in action it still remains a communistic regime and might become even more so! Read more on this here.

Another aspect of this entire debate is the role of Government in the ‘free web world’. Recently a cousin of mine from Germany said that the German government actually tracks pirated and illegal web content like movies, audio etc.. to the violaters computer. Where in it automatically takes a picture of the illegal content and then simply sends a summons to the person for cyber fraud. So this raises another question of ethics, how much of access should the government have to a citizens net access.

I have just penned down some thoughts, what are your ideas?

 
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