no-one is not evil

Here’s a sophisticated pro-China argument on the fallout from the Google affair, specifically on the internet freedom versus internet sovereignty issue. There’s a good point within it: 

The infrastructure for the Internet was built in a way which did not clearly follow national borders. A US IT company may have web servers in Iceland, which now has the most stringent laws protecting data privacy. The data may or may not sit on the company’s own web servers; it could just as easily sit in the cloud, on servers provided by Amazon, Microsoft, Google or Apple, adding yet another layer of abstraction. Just thinking about the legal aspect of this is likely to throw lawyers into a tizzy of billable hours. 

In contrast to this, the Chinese government has been very protective of Chinese consumer data. In China, consumer market research is a restricted industry, meaning that non-Chinese market research companies are not allowed to enter the field. In order to enter the industry, most western market research firms need to form joint ventures or partner with multiple Chinese market research firms. While the western market research firms do the analysis, the data is usually kept in the hands of the Chinese market research firms. This way, the data about Chinese consumers is always kept in the hands of the Chinese market research firms, and never leaves China’s borders. 

The implication is that China is simply and impartially acting to protect its people from pollution by foreign data on the one hand, and from being delivered as data into the hands of the foreign polluters on the other. 

Well, yeah. Pull the other one – sort of. I think this is a good point because the whole argument isn’t about freedom of information, but about who controls its spread and who gets to harvest the data. Google, a California based company which allows US government intelligence agencies access to its servers, wants the Communist Party to let it harvest as much data as it can for whatever purposes it chooses, and at least in theory wants that privilege to go to any other legally constituted organisation capable of and inclined to take advantage of it. The Communist Party says, like the man in Dawn of the Dead before the final mall apocalypse: we took it. It’s ours. 

China versus Google: a choice between being the exclusive property of one of the gang, or the common property of the gang as a whole. As I said before, no-one is not evil here.

Comments

[Martin]

"Google, a California based company which allows US government intelligence agencies access to its servers, wants the Communist Party to let it harvest as much data as it can for whatever purposes it chooses"

This is simply not true, Google will harvest whatever data you say they can harvest, with the use of robots.txt, you are are able to tell the googlebot, don't look at my website. So Google only harvests the data on the Wen, that you've specifically indicated is open to everyone.

Whether Google is evil or not is another question, but on the question of indexing of websites, Google is completely not evil.

[Phil]

Google only harvests the data on the Wen, that you've specifically indicated is open to everyone

Felicitous typo OTD.

[cian]

Martin. It harvests the data on its users. What they search for, etc, etc. Indexing of sites is irrelivant. The CCP could do that if they really wanted. Maybe they do.