The Rocket

Issue date: 2/3/06 Section: Life

Brandon Himes

Last week Google announced to the public that a new site, Google.cn was opening for business for Google users in China. An outcry was heard from the West all the way to the People's Republic as Google explained that its new site would conform to the censorship of information that China routinely practices. Google, you might as well have run over my dog. I shouldn't have thought that such a bitter, cynical computer nerd such as me could have become any more disillusioned about the existence of good in the world, so I suppose congratulations are in order.

The root of this debate lies in the lies, the ones that China has been electronically broadcasting to their people via omission. To accomplish this vile task the People's Republic employs a sinister technology known to its enemies as The Great Red Firewall. Aye, even the mention of the term firewall evokes a cringe of university students as they know well the trappings of this tyrant's reign. The Great Red Firewall however serves a much more insidious purpose than that of Slippery Rock's campus.

The campus firewall is used mostly for humane causes such as preventing malicious attacks from the internet that attempt to pretty upon the campus' network. Students, who generally are of a single mind, hold the firewall in infamy as it is employed in such tasks as prohibiting some online games and file-sharing applications. China's Firewall (the great red one) censors online resources deemed subversive or threatening to the People's Republic. That sounds pretty righteous until such topics as "democracy" or "independence" are labeled as such. Chinese web surfers who attempt to access these censored pages are promptly greeted with an error.

What does a Great Red Firewall have to do with Google; in this context, everything. Since the fall of 2002 Google has had an on again off again relationship with the Chinese people. By that I mean that for the Chinese http://www.google.com has been on, and then off, then on again, then off. This erratic behavior was a result of the conflict between Google's freedom-loving self-respecting answer (Heck no!) to the demand of the Chinese government that Google filter its search results so that the Chinese people weren't constantly observing the gaps the government had created in what information they could access. If only it could have stayed that way.

In August 2004 Google went public and began selling stock. Google had been raking in the cash up until this point. Many investors were chomping at the bit to get a piece of the action. The initial surge in stock purchases sent Google's stock prices through the roof. It was a good day; it's so seldom that someone doing good in the world is rewarded for it.

Continued...

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