Will China Google for Freedom? Case Study Example

Part I: Summary and Point of View

For the past two decades, Google has emerged as one of the most significant and powerful technology-driven companies around the globe. The company’s guiding philosophy is to provide consumers across the globe easy access to information. As such, its primary objectives are to effectively organize public information and to do so in an ethical manner. As Google has expanded its services to include email and phone services, ethical questions about privacy and copyright have arisen. Google email was launched in 2004 to address customer complaints that the majority of free e-mail services have a very low storage capacity. Gmail provides consumers with one gigabyte of memory free and helps keep messages well organized. Concerns were quickly raised by anxious Gmail users over the privacy of their accounts when they realized that Google looked through the contents of the consumer’s emails and placed advertisements geared towards the consumer gleaned from the contents of emails sent in virtual correspondences. At the center of this controversy is the privacy of individuals and Google’s policies towards protecting the privacy of its users that the company touts as its most important ethical principle in its code of conduct. However, Google punished an entire news agency after one of the reporters working for the news companies exposed how Google has not taken the necessary steps and protocols to fully protect individual privacy. In response to the expose, Google officials refused to speak to any reported from that station for at least a year. Such hypocrisy unequivocally contradicts the fundamental objective articulated by Google to organize and disseminate information all around the world in a cogent and safe manner. The ethics of Google as a technology company and its employees have thus been called into question, as privacy and copyright issues continue to be problematic for the company.

In another stunning case of hypocrisy back in 2000, Google launched a version of Google compatible in the Chinese language, which was operated from the U.S. through the website but could be purchased by Chinese consumers spanning the globe. Denying requests at the behest of the Chinese government, Google refused to block politically-sensitive and controversial sites in Communist China, so the Chinese government banned the use of Google for a transient period of time. Once the Chinese government removed the block, Chinese consumers only had access to certain websites because politically-sensitive sites were excluded from the domain. The Chinese website thus censored the Google use for consumers residing in China who could not search for terms such as “democracy” and “human rights” in addition to the name of anti-government groups (“Google,” n.d., p. 309). The problem with the censorship of Google results in China lay in the vacuity of the phrase “Don’t be evil” in Google’s mission statement. The definition of the concept of evil is an idiosyncratic one, thereby remaining open to interpretation. Any material the Chinese government rendered subversive was omitted from the search results. Google cofounder Sergey Brin defended the censorship of Google results in China by asserting that it is better that Chinese users still have access to a celeritous yet restricted Google search than have no access at all, thereby articulating a “lesser of two evils” postulation. As such, it is unequivocal that freedom and censorship on the Web has emerged as a contentious area and point of debate between China and the United States (Freeman, n.d., p. 3).

In January 2007, Google, Microsoft, Yahoo! And Vodafone collaborated in order to enact a set of human rights tenets that would directly address the issue of censorship. This agreement occurred subsequent to various human rights groups pressuring technology companies to promote freedom of the press and freedom on the web, arguing that people retained the individual freedom to surf the internet as they please without government interference. By 2010, Google promulgated that it would no longer cooperate with the Chinese government if web searches continued to be censored. Throughout 2010 and 2011, Google and the Chinese government had a tumultuous business partnership that ultimately ended in Google acquiescing to Chinese demands because of the company’s desire to become a major contender in the smartphone market. As such, critics decry the hypocrisy of Google as a company that touts freedom and privacy within the United States yet acquiesced to any and all limitations stipulated by the Chinese government for Google in China.

Another ethical dilemma Google faced at the outset of the twenty-first century was copyright infringement once the company began scanning books from different libraries around the world, including works from Harvard University, Oxford University, and Stanford University. Doing opened up the flood gates for authors to sue Google for copyright infringement because Google scanned their copyrighted works without asking for permission. Subsequently, five major publishing companies filed lawsuits against Google for copyright infringement. When Google acquired YouTube in 2006, a slew of copyright issues cropped up because YouTube offers consumers free access to internet videos. With each new program and technology such as the Android smartphone created by Google, privacy issues, along with copyright implications, loomed large. These issues remain disconcerting during the Digital Age as privacy has essentially been rendered obsolete. Google is a prime example of this unfortunate reality.

Part II: Questions for thought

Google propagates he notion that there is in place a universal set of principles and norms that should control the internet, and that the dissemination and free flow of information represents the principle of paramount importance. Thus, Google should not censor search results in China. Moreover, with the mission statement in mind, it can be argued that censorship represents an evil in itself.

Google does not want to be liable and sued for facilitating any online child pornography, which would threaten to derail the entire company. Moreover, turning over data to the DOJ could prove that Google’s has fickle mechanisms in place to ensure that all Google users and the users of Google services are over the age of thirteen. Google had already faced intense scrutiny with regards to the invasion of people’s privacy as well as copyright infringement lawsuits. As such, to avoid any more lawsuits, Google vehemently resisted turning over search information to the federal government.

Under the Google Library Project, Google would scan  various database materials from big libraries around the world in order to provide consumers with full texts of materials within the public domain. For works under copyright, people would only be able to see the search terms and a few words on each side of the search term. Google launched this program in order to aid consumers in their research from the comfort of their own home and/or school. Moreover, Google invoked the fair use doctrine in order to justify the legality of this project.

The most disconcerting issue is the fact that Google is able to bypass privacy settings of computers, laptops and smartphones in order to track the browsing habits of consumers, even those who blocked such a tracking service. This reality underscores how there is no privacy on the internet, even when consumers block tracking services.

References

Freeman, D. (n.d.). Will China Google for freedom? The Chinese, the internet, and free speech. BICCS Asia Paper, 5(3), 3-22.